It’s one of the biggest – and potentially, most consequential – decisions President Obama has made (not that he had much choice, according to some). He has announced that the 45,000 U.S. troops still Iraq will all be home for the holidays. Critics have said Iraq is too fragile for the U.S. to pull out – after eight bloody years there – and that the President should have pressured the Iraqis to let several thousand remain into 2012. John Nagl, of the Center for a New American Security, and I debate the pluses and minuses of the pullout plan with Lawrence Korb, a Reagan-era Pentagon official now at the Center for American Progress, and Michael O’Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution.
