Tonight’s speech from the Oval Office reached neither the rhetorical heights nor the strategic breadth we’ve come to expect from the president who is so verbally gifted (and whom some adoring journalists have dubbed an American Cicero). Mr. Obama, who has hated the Iraq War from the outset, at least praised what he could and should have — the men and women in uniform who’ve fought it. I was pleased that he donned the persona of a commander-in-chief for this speech. But it was anticlimactic, forgettable oratory — a tedious footnote in one of the nation’s longest wars.

–  Gleaves Whitney is director of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley State University.