President Obama At Camp Lejeune: The Beginning Of The End Of The Iraq War

It was a wonderful sight: Barack Obama, widely flogged during the presidential campaign for being a foreign policy lightweight and cut-and-run coward, announcing to an auditorium full of cheering Marines that most U.S. troops will be out of Iraq by August 2010 and all of the rest a year later.

The choice of Camp Lejeune in North Carolina was no accident. President Bush spoke there in April 2003 only a few weeks before his "Mission Accomplish" dog-and-pony show because it was a safe venue in which to rally support for a war that would rid the world of a very bad man and then be over in no time at all. The very bad man is gone, of course, but the war has dragged on for nearly six years, claimed 4,300 American and perhaps 100,000 Iraqi lives while further destabilizing the Middle East and drawing precious resources away from a war that needed to be fought in Afghanistan.

Obama's announcement was applauded by Senator John McCain as the young president yet again co-opted Republicans on what had been a core issue for them.

Most of the criticism came from Obama's fellow Democrats who said that his pledge to keep 35,000 to 50,000 troops in country as late as December 31, 2011, the full withdrawal deadline set by Iraqi leaders and Bush, violated a campaign promise. But that is so much nitpicking since he had promised a final withdrawal deadline of only two months earlier.

Senator John Kerry, whose ineffectual 2004 campaign assured the continuation of what was by then an increasingly unpopular war, praised Obama's troop withdrawal timetable and said it fulfills his promise to "be as careful getting out of Iraq as the Bush administration was careless going in."

That Obama was greeted by the Marines with such enthusiasm was not merely politeness. These men and women understand that their mission in Iraq should have been completed long ago and that the next assignment for many of them will be in Afghanistan, where the resurgent Al Qaeda-backed Taliban, which is putting twice as many guerrillas into the field today as it did two years ago, has fought U.S. and NATO troops to a stalemate.

Obama has said the U.S. will send another 17,000 troops to the troubled region and step up diplomatic efforts with Pakistan, which harbors the Al Qaeda leadership and many Taliban in mountainous border region with Afghanistan where tribal leaders have no allegiance to Islamabad.

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Obama's address at Camp Lejeune can be fairly considered the beginning of the end of a war that catapulted him to the presidency.

Yes, America got T-boned by a recession and Iraq was practically a footnote during the closing months of the campaign, but without Obama's opposition to the war from its outset it is not hard to image a commander in chief other than this African American flying into the sprawling military base aboard Marine One to make the most important announcement about the war since it began.

It is important to note, as few commentators have, that Obama announced a timetable without declaring victory had been achieved in Iraq, something that McCain and Hillary Clinton would have found it all but impossible to do.

In fact, any pretense that the U.S. will be leaving an Iraq that is stable and democratic is an illusion.

And there is another illusion, as well: As praiseworthy as Obama's determination to have all American boots back home by August 2011 may be, it was the flexing of Iraq's national sovereignty muscle and not Obama, let alone what has passed for an anti-war movement, that secured a no-residual-troops commitment from Washington. As in no permanent U.S. bases, which had been an ulterior motive of the 2003 invasion and is now an ultimate repudiation of the Bush-Cheney axis, which swore that imperial right would never be bargained away.

There is much that can go wrong between now and the summer of 2011.

Some commentators are concerned that U.S. generals will balk at fulfilling the terms of the Status of Forces Agreement. Not to worry.

Defense Secretary Gates, elaborating yesterday on the end game, said that the remaining 50,000 troops will no longer be called "combat troops" but rather "advisory and assistance brigades" and would be consolidated at a limited number of bases to reduce their exposure to harm.

The larger concern is that the volatile sectarian impulses that still bubble just beneath the surface in Iraq -- yes, those elements that the Surge was supposed to provide the opportunity to subdue and sedate but did not -- will compel troops to leave those bases and resume combat duties, again putting Americans in harm's way and delay an end that has been far too long in coming.

Top photograph by Jim Young/Reuters