Barack Obama's speech at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina may not mark the end of the war in Iraq – it is, rather, the beginning of the end – but it certainly marks a milestone in a personal odyssey that took an unknown young politician from obscurity all the way to the White House.
For it was the war in Iraq which propelled Obama's candidacy for the presidency. In October 2002 he made a speech that, in some ways, remains the most important of his career. Then a mere member of the Illinois state Senate, he joined a peace rally in Chicago and declared his opposition to "A dumb war. A rash war."
That stance helped him in his 2004 bid for the US Senate, but it mattered much more at the start of 2007, when he launched his improbable campaign for the presidency. The advantage Obama had over all his main competitors for the Democratic nomination – and especially frontrunner Hillary Clinton – was that he had opposed the invasion of Iraq while they had supported it. Indeed, he could point to the very week he had taken his stance in Chicago as the moment Clinton and the others cast their Senate votes to give George Bush the authority to wage war against Saddam Hussein.
As the war became ever more unpopular, especially among Democrats, that left Obama perfectly placed as the anti-war candidate. He could boast of his superior position, while Clinton was pressured to admit she had been wrong. Later, in the general election contest against John McCain, Obama could neutralise McCain's claims of greater experience by insisting that what mattered more was judgement – and that Obama had proven his was superior.
So it is no exaggeration to say that President Obama would not be where he is today had it not been for the Iraq war and his stance on it. All of which lent an extra charge to the announcement he made on Friday.
He was able to unveil a plan for "how the war in Iraq will end" without ambivalence, needing no contorted formulations to explain why he had changed his position – and no pretence that a clear-cut victory had been won – as would have been required by either a President McCain or President Hillary Clinton. He could be straightforward: This was a war he would never have started, and now he was going to end it.
To make that declaration before men and women in uniform was a masterstroke, signalling that he had only respect for those Americans who had fought the war – and heading off any suggestions, often hurled at Democrats, that he was insufficiently supportive of the military.
There was no shock in the speech. A combat troop withdrawal date a couple of months beyond the 16-month timetable he had promised in the 2008 campaign had been widely expected. Nor is it a surprise that all US troops will aim to be gone from Iraq by the end of 2011. That much was implied in the Status of Forces Agreement concluded with the Iraqi government. But to hear it directly from the mouth of a sitting US president, rather than low-level officials, and without heavy caveats, gives it enormous power.
It means Barack Obama is determined to go into the 2012 election campaign as the man who did what he promised, ending an unpopular war. And it marks yet another step in Obama's steady repudiation of his predecessor. In little more than a month, he has ordered the closure of Guantánamo, and on Tuesday he declared: "The United States does not torture." On Friday he drew one more line under the Bush era, seeking to conclude its most neuralgic episode.
