In 2005, the liberal Center for American Progress broke a long-standing Washington think-tank taboo: it called for a staggered withdrawal from Iraq. Despite being far from alone in believing the Iraq war was essentially lost, no other think-tank had put forth a strategy paper on actually winding down the U.S. troop commitment, preferring to propose discrete changes in war strategy instead of a broader re-think. However controversial the paper was at the time, several of the proposals in “Strategic Redeployment” — combat-troop withdrawal by the end of 2007; a shift in emphasis toward counterterrorism operations by a residual force of 1,000 Marines and Special Operations Forces; intensified regional diplomacy — have achieved the status of conventional wisdom in mid-2007, thanks in part to the partial blessing of the Baker-Hamilton Commission, which bore some similarities in its own recommendations.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=180547