It’s looking increasingly likely that when President Obama faces the voters in November 2012, he will have kept his promise to get us the fuck out of Iraq. And I don’t mean that we’ll be pretending to have left Iraq. It looks like we’ll have really left. Yes, we have a massive embassy in Baghdad and it will need protecting. And we’ll apparently have some presence in the cities of Basra, Irbil and Kirkuk, and those compounds will need protection, too. But that’s not really any different from any other country where we have consulates. The Iraqis aren’t going to give our troops immunity from prosecution, so we’re not going to keep a heavy presence there to help them maintain order, run their airports, or tamp down on any insurgencies against the central government.
I am sure that that our relationship will not end. I am sure that the CIA will continue to work with the Iraqi government, and that we’ll work out some contracts for military training on the equipment we’ll be selling them. But the war is going to end.
If true, this will fulfill the promise that mattered to me the most. I really, really wanted a health care bill. I got that. But I wanted out of Iraq more. Third on my list is getting the hell out of Afghanistan. That’s a work in progress.