“We’re so out of here”

'This week, John F. Burns, The Times’s chief foreign correspondent, will be taking questions on the end of the American war in Iraq.

In February, the newly inaugurated President Obama announced that all combat troops would be withdrawn by August 2010, seven and a half years after the war began, and the remaining troops by 2011.

But with relative calm in Iraq and instability expanding quickly in Afghanistan, Americans and their leaders increasingly see Iraq as the war already fought. “We’re so out of here,” a Marine officer said in July in Anbar province, once the heart of the insurgency there.

Does America seem intent on leaving Iraq, no matter what happens? Should we? Would a return to wide-scale sectarian violence, or the opening of a new front between Kurds and Arabs, obligate U.S. soldiers to stay? What was accomplished and what was left undone?'