When President Obama announces tonight that the remaining 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq are going to all come home by the end of 2011, that endpoint for the Iraq war will be set in bureaucratic and diplomatic stone, according to a top adviser.

Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes waves off recent media speculation that the U.S. and the Iraqi government might renegotiate a 2008 bilateral accord governing the ultimate exodus of U.S. troops from Iraq. "We're going to honor that agreement," Rhodes tells Danger Room during a conference call this afternoon. "Our view is that both of our governments are bound to it."

Obama will announce at 8 p.m. eastern times that Operation Iraqi Freedom, the combat mission in Iraq that began on March 19, 2003, has ended. In it's place: a year-long residual mission geared around training Iraqi forces and the odd Special Forces-led counterterrorism hit. But the insurgency, though far less lethal than before, has still proven able to carry out coordinated attacks, giving rise to some fears that the 600,000-strong Iraqi army and police aren't yet capable of taking over. Still, according to a "time horizon" that the Iraqi government compelled the Bush administration to accept in 2008 in the so-called Status of Forces Agreement, the U.S. military's presence in Iraq runs out on December 31, 2011.

Just this week, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the U.S.'s top diplomat during the surge, urged Obama to be receptive to any requests from the Iraqis for "U.S. military presence beyond the end of 2011." An architect of the war, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, issued a similar call in the *New York Times today. *Without endorsing it, the outgoing commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, acknowledged the possibility of the Iraqis asking us to stay in a Sunday interview.

Rhodes isn't buying it. "The Iraqis have not asked us to renegotiate it, and certainly, it would be up to the Iraqis" to initiate re-negotiations, he says. "Any talk of that is premature. All the internal planning of the U.S. government is our troops will all be out of Iraq by the end of 2011, consistent with that agreement."

It's true that the Iraqis have not formally asked the U.S. for any such amendment to the Status of Forces Agreement. But in Washington last spring, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki left the rhetorical door open just a little bit to asking the U.S. to maybe extend its stay. Judging from Rhodes's remarks, if Maliki or his successor issues any such formal request, he's not going to find a White House receptive to rekindling a war that has taken over 4400 American lives.

Credit: DoD

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