In a speech to U.S. troops in Iraq to mark the end of America’s military commitment there, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Thursday, “thank you for your loyalty to the future of Iraq.” It was a strange formualtion. Is that what America’s service personnel have been loyal to all these years? More importantly, it left a lingering question: Does the commander in chief share the troops’ loyalty to the future of Iraq?

President Obama presides over a successful conclusion to the war in Iraq — a success he did everything in his power to prevent. He opposed the war from the start and campaigned against the methods necessary to win it. Who can forget freshman Sen. Obama in 2007 spending nearly five minutes lecturing Gen. David Petraeus during a Senate hearing that the war was wrong, there were no good options left for success, and the gains that had been achieved since the start of the surge were not due to the surge?

Marking the accomplishments he dismissed as all but fantasy only four years earlier, President Obama told soldiers at Fort Bragg on Wednesday, “This is an extraordinary achievement, nearly nine years in the making. And today, we remember everything that you did to make it possible.” That is, everything the President opposed.

“We remember the surge and the Awakening,” he said, “when the abyss of chaos turned toward the promise of reconciliation. By battling and building block by block in Baghdad; by bringing tribes into the fold and partnering with Iraqi Army and police, you helped turn the tide toward peace.”

And we remember Sen. Obama saying in September of 2007, “The best way to protect our security and to pressure Iraq’s leaders to resolve their civil war is to immediately begin to remove our combat troops. Not in six months or one year — now.”

The President was never committed to victory in Iraq, and his haste to end our commitments there and in Afghanistan make both of those military successes more fragile than they should be. We are hardly fans of staying in those countries. We want to see all service members come home as soon as is practical. But pulling them out for political reasons right before a major election is a cynical and dangerous way to end a war.