The last American troops will withdraw from Iraq in the next three weeks.

President Obama and Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, met Monday, December 12, in Washington to claim that the U.S. emerges from the conflict unweakened and leaves behind an increasingly stable, democratic and prosperous Iraq, an article in The Independent says.

“This is misleading spin, carefully orchestrated to allow Mr Obama to move into the presidential election year boasting that he has ended an unpopular war without suffering a defeat. We already had a foretaste of this a couple of weeks ago, when Vice President Joe Biden visited Baghdad to laud U.S. achievements,” it says.

“Over the years, Iraqis have become used to heavily guarded foreign dignitaries arriving secretly in Baghdad to claim great progress on all fronts before scurrying home again. But even by these lowly standards, Mr Biden's performance sounded comically inept. "It was the usual Biden menu of gaffe, humor and pomposity delivered with unmistakable self-confidence and no particular regard for the facts on the ground," writes the Iraq expert Reidar Visser. Mr Biden even tried to win the hearts of Iraqis by referring to the U.S. achievement in building hospitals in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea, a city he apparently believes is located somewhere in Iraq.”

The article goes on: “Republican candidates in the presidential election have been denigrated and discredited by gaffes like this. It is a measure of Mr Biden's reputation for overlong, tedious speeches that the U.S. media did not notice his ignorance of Middle East geography.”