Obama and the Future of Iraq

A recent dispatch from Iraq by The New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller articulated something that has been true for several months now: America has moved on from the Iraq War. Much of the 2008 election was organized around that conflict. Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton in large measure by deriding the judgment she showed in supporting the 2003 Iraq war resolution. And John McCain's public embrace of George W. Bush's policies may have doomed his campaign from the start. Few things seemed to exhilarate Obama's supporters more than his firm call for "an end" to the Iraq war. And now, just six months into Obama's presidency, and even before Obama's troop-withdrawal plan has begun in earnest, Iraq has been replaced by Afghanistan as the conflict that will probably define his presidency.