THE PULLOUT HAS BEGUN

"Every way but militarily, withdrawal from Iraq is underway".

"On June 8, 1969, President Nixon announced the withdrawal of 25,000 American troops from Vietnam. Within the next few months, he would announce more redeployments. "He was reluctant to withdraw," says John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University and the author of several books on war and public opinion, "but he kept being pushed by politics."

Nixon recognized that without U.S. military support, the government of South Vietnam would fall to the Communist insurgency, and he believed that a fall would represent a humiliating and costly defeat. "But Nixon realized that his approval ratings would slip fast unless he made progress in bringing the boys home," writes Stanley Karnow in Vietnam: A History. American officials searching for a "breaking point" in Vietnam had found one, but what had broken was not the insurgency. It was U.S. public opinion: Americans no longer believed the war was worth it.

President Bush may not know it yet—or, then again, he may—but in Iraq he is about to do a Nixon. Psychologically and politically, the withdrawal phase has already begun. Militarily, the pullback will start within weeks or, at most, months after the December 15 Iraqi parliamentary elections."