Milestones don’t always mark what they should. Tomorrow all these things are true: there are 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq; procedures and circumstances and contingencies pertain whereby urban security will still be a U.S. mission; there is a U.S. combat mission, by binding diplomatic accord, for an additional 13 months; another year will pass after that before U.S. troops depart; there is ever-present danger in Iraq, if not necessarily strategic peril; and the scope and contour of a U.S.-Iraqi relationship on January 1, 2012 remains to be determined, and may feature a small U.S. military advisory presence. Within this context, it’s easy to consider June 30, 2009 a minor date on a calendar that always has another page.

But not if you’re an Iraqi. Just read the outpouring that the Washington Post reports for the end of a major U.S. presence in the cities and the towns:

"Out, America out!" a group of sweat-drenched young men chanted Monday at a Baghdad park as the sun was setting. They jumped up and down to the deafening beat of drums and the wail of horns. 

It’s a "carnival" in Baghdad, according to the Post‘s Ernesto Londono, filled with Iraqi troops grinning as they take their lives into their own hands and graffitti writers further south demanding, "Pull your troops from our Basra, we are its sons and want its sovereignty." Don’t tell them tomorrow is just another day. These are the people in whose name the U.S. justified six years of a blunder. Like any rational people enduring a foreign military occupation, they light candles and wave banners and sing patriotic songs when the occupier pulls away.

Occupier — what a nauseating word to hear; what an enfeebling thing to be; what a distorting condition to bear. Remember when Zell Miller told us that nothing made that Marine madder than to hear U.S. troops described as occupiers and not liberators? His complaint should have been registered with the man who made them into such a thing, not with those who wouldn’t speak euphemistically or patronizingly about it. What U.S. troops have endured they have endured heroically, in a manner that those who haven’t served can’t comprehend. I consider it more heroic that they’ve done it in spite of the war’s maculate conception. They shouldn’t take this personally:

…spraying water from bottles at the crowd, they began chanting: "America has left! Baghdad is victorious!" 

Any proud nation has to feel this way. It reminds us how we inflicted ourselves upon a people that never consented to our invasion. We were never the "strongest tribe" in Iraq, but we learned how to operate within a tribal system that we were never prepared to learn, and how to balance that against a modernity that we sought to foster, and how to do all of that in spite of what we told ourselves our goals were. These are impressive acts of mitigation. But if we ever learn a true lesson from Iraq, it has to be the lesson that we should never again inflict ourselves upon a people who want to light firecrackers when they hear that we’re finally leaving, years before we actually leave.