Published for Foreign Policy Shadow Government, September 25, 2012

Has Obama fulfilled his most famous national security campaign commitment from 2008: to end the Iraq war “more responsibly” than he says we began it? According to this excerpt from Michael Gordon’s new book on Iraq, the answer may well turn out to be no.

Gordon is considered by many to be the best reporter on the Iraq war and his long-awaited book is likely to shed new light particularly on the last half-decade of U.S. involvement. The excerpt in Sunday’s New York Times covers the Obama administration’s failed effort to negotiate terms for the long-planned-for stay-behind military force. The Obama administration is understandably reluctant to talk about these efforts much, and nowadays when the president mentions Iraq he makes it sound like he never considered anything other than withdrawing all but a handful of U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. However, if that was what the president secretly intended all along, it was not what the administration was officially pursuing for the first several years when it tried, unsuccessfully, to negotiate a new Status of Forces Agreement.

I raised questions about some of these developments as they unfolded (see here, here, and here) and now Gordon’s reporting is pulling back the veil to answer some of those questions.