President Barack Obama yesterday honoured America’s nearly nine years of “bleeding and building” in Iraq, hailing the “extraordinary achievement” of a war he once branded “dumb.”

There is something profound about the end of a long war

“Welcome home, welcome home,” Mr Obama cried in an aircraft hangar in North Carolina, basking in the “Ooh Ahh” cheers and red berets of 82nd Airborne Division troops, part of the final US exodus from Iraq unfolding this month.

“We knew this day would come. We have known it for some time now. But still, there is something profound about the end of a war that has lasted so long,” Mr Obama said, seeking to forge national reconciliation after a divisive conflict.

“It is harder to end a war than to begin one,” said Mr Obama, who made the responsible resolution of a conflict unleashed in the “shock and awe” US aerial bombing of Baghdad in March 2003 his core political promise.

Against a backdrop of transport planes and army vehicles in mustard yellow desert livery at Fort Bragg, a base which sent off 202 soldiers to die in Iraq, Mr Obama only obliquely referred to the political fury whipped up by the war.

“It was a source of great controversy here at home, with patriots on both sides of the debate,” he said, remembering he was a state senator and many of the bloodied veterans before him were in school when fighting started.

“Indeed, everything that American troops have done in Iraq – all the fighting and all the dying; the bleeding and the building; the training and partnering – has led us to this moment of success,” the US commander-in-chief said.

“We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people,” Mr Obama added.

“We are building a new partnership between our nations. And we are ending a war not with a final battle, but with a final march toward home.”