By Andrew L. Jaffee

“Let me be clear: There is no military solution in Iraq and there never was,” said presidential candidate Barack Obama in September 2007. Eight hours ago, he “announced the withdrawal of most of the 142,000 US troops in Iraq by August 2010… he said some 35,000 to 50,000 soldiers would stay on until the end of 2011 to train and support Iraqi security forces. All troops will be pulled out by 2012.” So now an “immediate withdrawal” means two-to-three years? I’m not complaining by any means because this timetable pretty much ensures mission success. As Pres. George H. W. Bush once said, “Stay the course.”

It would be too easy for me to just say, “I told you so,” but Obama’s actions belie all the dogmatic criticisms of the Iraq effort. His delaying the U.S. troop withdrawal is an implicit admission that Operation Iraqi Freedom was a success and the right thing to do — the rebuilding of the Iraqi nation for the notions of democracy and freedom. Even the mainstream media has (quietly) hailed Iraq’s recent elections as an “extraordinary achievement.”

This is the reality of politics. Campaigners can make all sorts of promises, but holding the mantle of the presidency is a completely different animal. Even as we got closer to the election, Obama and his Democratic primary opponent Hillary Clinton were back-peddling on the “immediate withdrawal” mantra. Obama is now faced with world-wide responsibility. He is also learning something profound about U.S. politics.

The saving grace of the American political landscape is the overwhelming power of the center, and the adaptability of a naturally self-correcting system. If this were not the case, then certainly the top Democrats debating in 2007 during the primaries would have continued to cater to their far-Left constituency, and demanded the immediate pull-out of American troops from Iraq. Back then we heard some cries from the loony-Left about how they’d been “betrayed,” and some are still complaining. (Yes, the loony-Left was betrayed by Obama — after he secured their votes.)

Now that Obama is president, the Left is awful quiet — maybe too quiet, precisely because any admission that Iraq is a success would be acknowledging that 7 years of screaming “blood for oil” was one of the Left’s Big Lies. I doubt we’ll hear any honest admissions. Acceptance that the number one criticism of the Bush presidency was nonsense will stick in the Left’s throat like a prickly-thorned cactus. The matter will fade until the history books enshrine Bush as a man who ignited the evolution of Arab/Muslim society.