I come to quibble with Andrew Sullivan:

But I fear, unlike Peter, that [Republican voters and politicians]  have not tired of wars, just counter-insurgencies, and will never support actual withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan ever, because it reveals “weakness” in the war they want to escalate rather than defuse, and to use for domestic purposes rather than to understand and win.

Well, they’ve acquiesced to a rather substantial drawdown in Iraq, haven’t they? There’s a lot of time between now and December 2011, I grant you. But so far, leading Republican foreign-policy voices — or, really, anyone — have stopped themselves short of arguing for a continued war in Iraq in any substantial way. The Iraq-withdrawal occurred. In a big-picture sense, the withdrawal crowd won it in November 2008, with an assist (that the general public didn’t really know about) from the Bush administration, which itself acquiesced to Iraqi withdrawal demands in the Status of Forces Agreement. The president secured military support for withdrawal by slow-walking it in 2009 and staggering it until 2011, the SOFA deadline. That had enormous political utility. Any politician who tries to make an issue out of December 2011 will have to answer for his or her deafening silence throughout 2009.

I don’t think Andrew is wrong about the tension felt on the right about letting go of Iraq. And time will tell about Afghanistan, which doesn’t have the same sort of ideological valence that Iraq did or that the culture-war-ish anxiety over Islam does. But while no one was looking, a policy consensus formed on Iraq that substantively favors the end of American military involvement in the war* and the emergence of a post-war, post-occupation paradigm for bilateral relations.

*except for 6000 contractors to guard diplomats!