Building on the post that two many things have happened in the past year to determine if it was "the surge" that led to stabilization in Iraq, I wanted to comment on the argument for / against withdrawing troops.
Many of those who supported the surge continue to support keeping troops in Iraq, even if it means doing so against Iraqi wishes (see McCain). Interestingly, at the time, Maliki was less than enthusiastic about the surge himself. The reasons for maintaining troops, however, have changed. 18 months ago, the surge was supposed to provide breathing space for Iraqis by providing additional security to reduce violence allowing them to pass necessary laws. Now that violence has gone down, the argument is we need to keep troops in order to make sure violence stays down. If violence were to go back up, the argument would be to keep troops in to reduce violence again. Whatever the conditions are, the argument is to maintain troops. Though McCain argues troop reductions should be dictated by conditions on the ground, there is no clear explanation of what those conditions should be.
This is remarkbly similar to arguments over tax cuts and missile defense. On tax cuts, during the 2000 election Bush argued we needed tax to return the surplus to the people. As the economy began to slow down, the tax cuts were needed to spur the economy. Whatever the prevailing economic conditions are, hard core tax cut proponents think taxes should be cut. There is an ideological belief that tax cuts are good, so all economic conditions justify tax cuts.
Missile defense fell into a similar scenario. The same proponents of missile defense before 9-11 supported it after 9-11 in spite of the fact that we were shown that terrorist were likely to use somewhat unexpected delivery methods to hurt the US, not a ballistic missile. Though proponents of missile defense cannot really point to anyone that has a missile that a) has a missle that can hit us and b) is likely to shoot at us, 9-11 proved US vulnerability and, therefor, the need to have missile defense.
Note, however, that the same thing can happen the other way. Those in favor of pulling troops out of Iraq need to take care in how that argument is justified. Pre-surge, one of the arguments was that too many US soldiers were dying. Casualties are down tremendously, so that argument is less powerful now (though every loss is sad).
Obama's broader strategic argument is much better here. The real reason the Iraq war was a mistake, beyond the fact that Iraq did not have WMD, ties to Al Qaeda, and presented no real threat to the US, was that it hurt the US strategically by taking resources away from Afghanistan and limiting the US ability to respond to other threats seriously. The larger strategic mistake is not fixed by the surge. Kerry did a good job on Meet the Press trying to argue this, though Lieberman made the counterattack clear: rather than focus on the argument, he painted the response that things other than the surge matter as insulting the troops.
I digress. Those who favor fairly rapid withdraw (anything less than say 30 months), need to keep the eye on the strategic prize -- the large troop presence hurts US interest regardless of the current level of violence -- and to press those who argue for troop removal depending on the "facts on the ground" to explain what those facts would need to be.
