[Beginning] of the End in Iraq

I wasn't at all sure this would happen when I was reading the paper this morning, but Obama's speech was better than I hoped.

The key acknowledgement wasn't the 18th month draw down.  With 50k troops as a resisidual force, that's more than the U.S. will have in Afghanistan, even after 17k more arrive as ordered.  However, he also acknowledged the reality of our agreement with the Iraqis, everybody out by the end of 2011.  As Ackerman notes, originally Obama was talking about keeping that force there indefinitely  (That's why I supported Edwards specifically for the Iowa primary.  Let's just say I'm very glad we dodged that bullet.)

Marc Lynch describes the good parts of the speech in detail.  One point he picks up on that particularly gladened me, we are committing to help resettle Iraqi refugees including those that can't go home because they helped us.  This is the necessary moral adjunct to respecting Iraqi self-determination, we still owe a debt to those individual Iraqis that threw in their lot with us.  Also, admirably, Obama did take the time to directly address the people of Iraq.

Ackerman has the full text as well as some additional useful insight.

There was, of course, still some hedging in the speech.  That's to be expected.  Even so, why am I so assured?  I think Fred Kaplan sums it up best:

For some time now, the United States has had less and less say over the nature and direction of post-Saddam Iraq. We declared it to be a sovereign nation, at which point its leaders started acting as if it were true...

If all hell breaks loose, is it possible to revise the SOFA to let U.S. troops remain? Strictly speaking, no. Article 30 states that either party can notify the other that it's terminating the agreement—but it also notes that the termination wouldn't take effect until one year after the notice (by which time the full withdrawal might be mandatory). The Iraqi parliament could theoretically draft a new SOFA, but the one in place now took many months to compose, and if the country is falling apart—the premise of this scenario—it's unlikely that the factions would agree on a revision or on wanting U.S. troops to stay in any case.