Obama's Op-Ed in the Times today:

As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal.

In carrying out this strategy, we would inevitably need to make tactical adjustments. As I have often said, I would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected. We would move them from secure areas first and volatile areas later. We would pursue a diplomatic offensive with every nation in the region on behalf of Iraq’s stability, and commit $2 billion to a new international effort to support Iraq’s refugees.

Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won’t have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq.

Unlike Senator McCain, I would make it absolutely clear that we seek no presence in Iraq similar to our permanent bases in South Korea, and would redeploy our troops out of Iraq and focus on the broader security challenges that we face.

Readers, thoughts?

I guess prosecution for war profiteering, post-Presidency impeachment, and war crimes trials aren't on the table, but then I never thought they would be. (And a Truth and Reconciliation Commission will have to come from the real grass roots.)

I guess, and I know this will sound hopeless and cynical and disempowered, but we live under a criminal regime and, after the FISA Clusterfuck, I'm not sure we'll ever get relief... I guess what I feel at this point is that the war has run its course, as wars do, even total wars, which this was not. A lot of little people have died, and the great have postured and looted even more vociferously than usual. So what's not to like? In practice, Hillary, or McCain, would end up doing more or less what Obama will do, because we really don't have the power to do anything else, for fiscal reasons alone. And as usual, the devil is always in the qualifiers and the details. I don't know what "similar to our permanent bases in South Korea" means, for example. We've got permanent bases all over the world -- which I agree with Ron Paul we ought to be getting rid of -- so we could have a permanent presence that wasn't "similar to" South Korea, but like Uzbekistan or Okinawa, for example. When I see the permanent bases either jackhammered to bits or turned over to the Iraqis for non-military uses, I'll believe.