The troop withdrawal form Iraq is actually on schedule. Marc Lynch, assessing President Obama's foreign-policy record, observes:
Obama is on track to deliver on his campaign promise to withdraw from Iraq --- something which voters might begin to notice next month when they discover that he has also met his promise to get down to 50,000 troops. He's already almost there, without anyone really paying attention, and he has admirably resisted all pressure and temptation to relax the timeline in the face of the political paralysis of Iraq's political class. What's more, Iraqi security forces and state institutions have proven quite robust during the extended political crisis, and the general security trends are not nearly as dire as the headlines would suggest.
Today, the administration sent reporters background information on the withdrawal effort, highlighting the "end" of combat operations on August 31 and recommitting to withdrawing all American troops from Iraq by 2011. The administration also emphasizes that the shift in resources to Afghanistan has not prevented overall drawdown in America's foreign deployment: "Even with the surge in Afghanistan, the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will have been reduced from 177,000 to roughly 146,000 ... the drawdown of U.S. forces from Iraq since January 2009 comprises roughly three times as many troops as the President ordered to Afghanistan last December."
No doubt those advocating for faster withdrawal will point to the remaining 50,000 troops in Iraq as evidence of a broken promise from the president. Even if you feel that Obama's campaign plan to withdraw all "combat troops" and "reduce our presence there to the mission of protecting our embassy, protecting our civilians and making sure that we're carrying out counterterrorism activities there" wasn't fulfilled, the unrecognized fact is that we are moving speedily toward full withdrawal from Iraq, despite early qualms. If this trend continues apace, it will be one of the few outright foreign-policy successes of Obama's first two years in office.
-- Tim Fernholz
