I appreciate your service and your anectdotal experiences about schools and stoplights, etc., particularly since I have no first-hand knowledge. And I acknowledge the democratic elections as a good thing, although sharia law has much greater influence under the new Constitution in Iraq than ever before. The various extremist Shia religious leaders have far greater power and influence and the central government has been dysfunctional since its inception.
However reports from the Iraq Health Ministry, UN, Red Crescent and NGO relief organizations are pretty clear that the health conditions, particularly of children, are worse than during the Saddam regime. As are the water and sewer infrastructure (which explains in part the deteriorating health conditions) although they are slowly improving despite the massive corruption and fraud of US contractors and Iraqi government officials, at least according to reports from the DoD SIGIR.
The money has NEVER stopped, regardless of what you heard every October. There has been a continuous flow, mostly through emergency appropriations and continuing resolutions, rather than the annual (October) budget process. I may not have served in Iraq, but I am pretty well tuned in to the workings of Capitol Hill. If you had to "sit on your hands for a month or more," it was not because of a lack of authorized and appropriated funding, but rather because DoD has been a total fuck-up in providing the troops what they needed.
And Bosnia was "fixed" because of the
Dayton Accords, not by maintaining a long-term massive US military presence. (Clinton forced the various parties in the sectarian conflict to negotiate a workable political solution unlike Bush who agreed to impose political benchmarks on the Iraqis then lowered the bar when they were not met) And like Bosnia, the "fix" in Iraq can only come about through political reconciliation among the Iraqis, not through long-term occupation by an unwanted foreign power.