1) Who starts something is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. It's about who finishes it. The US is seen to have just as much an obligation to Iraq as it did to Japan and Germany.
2)
Operation Werwolf was ongoing for many years after the official end of hostilities and Japanese garrisons on islands that were cut off
continued to fight for some time.
3) ibid.
Hell, the wikipedia page for Werwolf even has a section dedicated to explicit comparisons to the Iraq war. Bush declared it to be similar after the initial invasion in 2003, which was obviously wrong, but I would think that the comparison is a fair one now that the combat troops have left.
now you're just arguing for the sake of arguing. what point are you trying to make? that the war in iraq is definitively over? no one disagrees that the withdrawal wasn't significant, but it didn't 'end the war'. technically, the war was over in 2003 after the fall of the ba'athist regime. that took a few weeks. the next 8 years were the occupation and reconstruction. on the other hand, the fall of the third reich took six years; was the product of a unqualified surrender, total military defeat, and international arbitration. the two are
literally incomparable.
1) who starts the war isn't irrelevant. the fact that this was a thinly veiled war of aggression was a decisive factor in the lack of international support for it. and you don't think it mattered that nazi germany started world war II? i also don't know what your point about obligation means... the U.S. has no ongoing obligation to iraqi, nor did it ever have one for western europe and japan. rather, its ongoing role in these nations was contingent on the interest it had altering their historical trajectories
2) the comparison of the iraqi insurgency to werwolf is unfounded. numerically, the two are incomparable. at its peak, the insurgency numbered ~130,000... werwolf was a canard and no one can say for sure that
any organised resistance ever existed or for how long. the japanese holdouts only numbered in the hundreds at most, a fact attributable to the nationalist zealotry of imperial japan and miscommunication. not only that, but the iraqi insurgency is also related to historically unique circumstances (a global war on terror, transnational terrorism, pan-islamism/arabism so on and so forth) that render a comparison to the past useless.
the comparison of world war II to iraq is spurious at best and i don't know whether you're making the point you want to make. if the point is that obama 'ended' the iraq war, that was already scheduled to happen. the iraqi government was on a timeline for assuming full responsibility - mostly corresponding to the decimation of the insurgency. of course, while republicans like McCain criticised the decision, Bush is actually the one who set the december, 2011 deadline for withdrawal, so i'm not entirely convinced that McCain wouldve handled the withdrawal any differently. we'll never know. but tens of thousands of americans remain in iraq, some performing functions that are perilously close to combat roles. i don't think the war is over.
