Although both the Democratc and Republican presidential campaigns will have reason to say otherwise this fall, I suspect that the San Francisco Chronicle’s Carolyn Lochhead has this one nailed:

Since the invasion five years ago, Iraq has delivered enough surprises and overturned enough certainties – and the candidates have left themselves enough wiggle room – that there is reason to believe the United States could still be in Iraq five years from today if a Democrat wins the White House. Few anticipate a 21st century replay of Vietnam, where former presidents misled the public. Richard Nixon turned out to have a secret plan not to end the war, and Lyndon Johnson attacked Republican Barry Goldwater as a warmonger only to escalate the war himself. Yet voters today must make that same leap of faith. “There’s an old saying in war that the initial war plan never survives contact with the enemy,” said Michael Mandelbaum, head of the foreign policy program at the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies. “I would say of the Democrats, neither of these peace plans is going to survive contact with reality.”

Again, this is not to say that key figures in the Obama and Clinton camps don’t mean what they say (though I have my doubts about the candidates themselves). But reality will, indeed, intrude. Leaders inside and outside Iraq will weigh in against the instability that a precipitous withdrawal would bring, and no president will want to preside over an ignominious retreat.

Sorry, Kosby Kids. The grown-ups will be making the decisions.