Operation Iraqi Freedom began in March 2003, with the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Twenty-one days later the regime of Saddam Hussein fell. That was the easy part. On May 1 of that year President George W. Bush felt confident enough to give his "Mission Accomplished" speech.

On Sept. 1, much bloodshed later, Operation Iraqi Freedom will morph into Operation New Dawn, another codename perhaps freighted with over-optimism. By the end of this month the U.S. military presence, which peaked at 171,000 in 2007, will be down to a 50,000 "transitional force." By the end of 2011 U.S. troops are to be gone altogether, a deadline that the U.S. and Iraq negotiated before Barack Obama took office.

Obama arbitrarily set the end of August deadline and the military will meet it.

By May, the number of U.S. troops was down to 88,000 and the pace of withdrawal has increased since. The troops remaining will train and advise the Iraqi military, conduct targeted counterterrorism operations and protect the U.S. officials, mostly civilians, who will be staying on.

That transition reflects Obama's determination to change the U.S. commitment "from a military effort led by troops to a civilian effort led by our diplomats." Guaranteeing their safety will be vital because the State Department has had difficulties persuading its diplomats to serve in Iraq. Meanwhile, the level of violence, which had been falling for two years, is starting to edge back up.

Complicating the handover of responsibility for Iraq to U.S. diplomats is that they don't have a permanent Iraqi government to work with. Despite the weekly blandishments of Vice President Joe Biden, Iraq's quarreling political factions have been unable to form a government since the March 7 elections. The country is being run by a caretaker government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki whose party finished second in those elections, clouding his claim to authority.

Obama is giving a series of speeches this month (including the one he delivered in Atlanta earlier this week), drawing attention to the fact that his administration had met the Aug. 31 deadline "as promised and on schedule." But Operation Iraqi Freedom has left behind a familiar litany of problems - armed Shiite and Sunni gangs, Kurdish separatists in the north, a meddling Iran on its borders, al-Qaida seeking to regain a foothold, and dysfunctional power grids and oilfields.

Americans weary of a war hope that "Operation New Dawn" is not as wildly off the mark as "Mission Accomplished" turned out to be. Most Americans don't mind having U.S. troops stationed abroad as long as they are ensuring peace and as long as they are not being shot at. The fear is that by beating a too-hasty retreat from Iraq, Obama is laying the groundwork for the eventual collapse of the democratic groundwork laid there at such great sacrifice in blood and treasure by the people of this country. Ensuring the viability of the peace bought by President Bush's Surge (and which then-U.S. Sen. Obama loudly opposed) deserves a higher priority than pulling U.S. troops out of that country in the interests of serving Obama's purely political and self-serving deadline.