Editorial: 'Commitment' needs defining

We're sort of done with Iraq: The president could have articulated a more detailed explanation of what the country is in for.

As much as the Iraq war will ever have a formal end it did so this week when President Barack Obama in a rare speech from the Oval Office pronounced "the end of our combat mission in Iraq."

It would take a cataclysmic event -- an invasion by Iran, for example -- to get us to send combat troops back in. Otherwise, there is no way our departing war machine is going into reverse.

But, said the president, while the combat mission is ending -- and for all practical purposes already has -- "our commitment to Iraq's future is not." However, he did not expand on precisely what that commitment is. Certainly not in the president's thinking a major U.S. military presence. He repeated his pledge that all U.S. troops will be out by the end of 2011.

By then what is now being described as "an advise and assist" mission will be turned over to U.S. civilians who at this moment don't appear up to that mission or particularly enthusiastic about pursuing it.

The premise for fighting the war kept changing over time, from eliminating what turned out to be nonexistent weapons of mass destruction to overthrowing Saddam Hussein to rebuilding a free and democratic Iraq, capable of defending itself and being a partner in the war on terror. Saddam is indeed gone.

In any case, Obama said, "We have met our responsibility. Now it is time to turn the page."

In the same breath that he declared the war over, the president said the U.S. must refocus on shoring up our own prosperity. Indeed without the trillion dollar cost of the war, he envisioned something like a peace dividend that would go toward the domestic economy and our other outstanding military obligation, the war in Afghanistan.

While Iraq has wound down, the president indicated he would ramp up U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, using the additional resources "to go on offense."

Maybe it was an oversight, but the president said nothing about Afghanistan that smacked of nation building. Instead he articulated the more limited and achievable aims of disrupting, dismantling and defeating al-Qaeda while preventing terrorists from using Afghanistan as a base.

We look forward to the day when the president returns to the Oval Office to announce the end of our combat mission there as well.