President Obama addressing the nation from the Oval Office - which has new decor, some eagle-eye observers noted.

Obama’s primetime speech Tuesday marked the end of America’s combat mission in Iraq; questions of whether the war is actually over aside, how did he do?

Last night, America’s seven-year combat mission in Iraq came to an official end with President Barack Obama’s Oval Office address to the nation: “Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country,” he intoned. “This was my pledge to the American people as a candidate for this office. Last February, I announced a plan that would bring our combat brigades out of Iraq, while redoubling our efforts to strengthen Iraq’s Security Forces and support its government and people. That’s what we’ve done.  We’ve removed nearly 100,000 U.S. troops from Iraq.  We’ve closed or transferred to the Iraqis hundreds of bases.  And we have moved millions of pieces of equipment out of Iraq. This completes a transition to Iraqi responsibility for their own security.”

Watch the President’s Oval Office address:

But, as with anything the President says, observers are divided on his performance and his words actually mean.

The Wall Street Journal, a paper that has little love for the President, complained in a leading editorial that he is “an ambivalent Commander in Chief” and that perception was only heightened by the speech. Though the paper conceded that he hit the right notes in his gratitude to the troops, America’s “commitment to Iraq’s future”, and even his “salute” to President George Bush, that wasn’t enough: “But to our mind—and we suspect to the foreign ear—he also focused too much on the ‘huge price’ and burdens of the last seven years, rather than on what our troops accomplished, or on the strategic opportunities that their sacrifice now allows.”

Conservative National Review Online also lamented the lack of confidence and even celebration in Obama’s tone, as well as what it considered an effort to distance himself from “Bush’s war”. “For now, we have transformed Iraq from a hostile, terrorist-supporting dictatorship destabilizing the region into a ramshackle democracy that is an ally in the war on terror,” the news site claimed in an editorial. Firmly crediting Bush with that, the site chastised Obama for a lack of “strategic vision” when it comes to Iraq’s future, one that was bought and paid for by American blood.

Members of the military listen as President Barack Obama talks with soldiers at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, Aug. 31, 2010. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

“[The Iraq War] was a wild overreaction by a paranoid, overmilitarised American state to a single spectacular, but inconsequential, act of terrorism on 9/11.”

But success is a relative term in Iraq. Simon Jenkins, writing in The Guardian, claimed that Iraq is only “marginally freer than in 2003” and “considerably less secure”: “The Iraq war will be seen by history as a catastrophe that did more than anything else to alienate Atlantic powers from the rest of the world and disqualify them as global policemen. It was a wild overreaction by a paranoid, overmilitarised American state to a single spectacular, but inconsequential, act of terrorism on 9/11…. The west is leaving Iraq in a pool of blood, dust and dollars. It remains wedded to Iraq’s twin sister in folly, Afghanistan.”

Few, then, were happy with Obama’s speech, but there were some. Ellen Ratner, Washington bureau chief for Talk News Radio Service, declared in an op-ed for Fox News, “President Obama made the finest tribute to American soldiers that I have ever heard on Tuesday night. To say that he was eloquent was an understatement.”

Others wonder on the premise of the speech: The war in Iraq is over, but what does that mean? Maurice Decaul, an Iraq War veteran and former Marine, explored that question in a moving piece for The New York Times’s Opinionator blog. Reflecting on the familiarity of the weight of his young daughter in her Baby Bjorn carrier – “it was about the weight of an Interceptor with both Sappi plates inserted” – Decaul observed, “We carry these wars inside of us. They tag along in our lives as sea stories and memories, dreams and nightmares, living just below the surface, raging back at times, most times living in quiescence.” Wars are never really over, not for those who fought them and not for those who suffered through them.