One can be forgiven for assigning political motives to the president's decision to withdraw from Iraq when scarcely anytime elapsed between his announcement and his campaign touting it to his base.
There are certainly no strategic reasons to justify it.
Iraqi democracy is real but fragile. Next-door neighbor Iran has regional aspirations that hinge on both a nuclear program and influencing affairs in Mesopotamia.
American retreat makes this infinitely easier. Coupled with the drawdown President Obama hopes to achieve soon in Afghanistan, America is on the verge of surrendering most, if not all ability to shape affairs in the Middle East towards our interests. Not only are we declining to give support to incipient democratic elements but we are leaving a vacuum that Iran and other Islamist actors will not hesitate to fill. This decision effectively gives those seeking to attack the United States greater latitude to do so.
As Frederick and Kimberly Kagan point out, America's retreat from Iraq is as shameful an abdication of responsibility and strategic sense as our retreat from Vietnam -- except that Iraq is at the center of the global region most pivotal to America's long-term national security.
For someone who has complained ad nauseum about the predicament his predecessor left him in, the president is inexplicably creating a mess that his successors will have to deal with for a generation or more. All so he can keep a campaign promise he never should have made in the first place.
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