Correlation is not causation, you know. Still:

All US troops will be pulled out of Iraq by the end of the year, President Barack Obama has announced.

He ordered a complete withdrawal from the country, nearly nine years after the invasion under President George W Bush.

About 39,000 US troops remain in Iraq, down from a peak of 165,000 in 2008.

The US and Iraq were in “full agreement” on how to move forward, Mr Obama said, adding: “The US leaves Iraq with our heads held high.”

“That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end.”

Before the speech the White House said: “This will allow us to say definitively that the Iraq war is over,” and said the US and Iraq would work as two sovereign nations.

Maybe if we’d kept up blogging right the way along the administration could have been less aggressively disappointing.

Anyway, we still want it.