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From The Cafferty File:

Tomorrow marks an historic day for Iraq — the deadline for U.S. combat troops to pull out of its cities — and Iraqis are reacting with mixed feelings. The government has declared it a national holiday, with celebrations and military parades planned.

Many Iraqis say they’re glad to see Americans gone… that they will feel freedom and liberation. But, others aren’t so sure… One Baghdad resident says she feels “fear and horror”… and says many Iraqis will be “afraid of each other.” Others say they have come to depend on U.S. troops.

More than six-years after the invasion — the U-S says Iraqi forces are ready to take control of security in the cities. We’ll see soon enough. The last 10 days have seen several bomb attacks and assorted violence which has left more than 200 Iraqis dead and hundreds more wounded. Iraqi and U.S. officials had warned of an expected rise in attacks around this withdrawal date.

After the handover — U.S. forces will have to get permission from Iraq to go into cities or carry out operations in urban areas. There will be a small number of U.S. troops remaining in cities to train and advise Iraqi forces — but most of them will be in bases outside city limits.

There are about 131,000 U.S. troops still in Iraq. Most are supposed to leave the country by next summer, with all forces gone by the end of 2011.

Here’s my question to you: What is life likely to be like in Iraq without the presence of U.S. combat forces in its cities?

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Wolf Blitzer talks to Michael Ware about the increase in violence as the deadline for U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq's major cities nears. As Michael points out, it's not that people have not been dying there all year.

Our press in the United States just hasn't been covering it. Maybe John McCain and Lindsey Graham can go over and visit the markets in Baghdad for another rug shopping excursion and tell all of us how wonderful everything is there right now.

I'm sure they'll do their best to blame what's happening now on the Obama administration, rather than the fact the people such as themselves thought it was such a great idea to go in there in the first place and blow up and occupy a country that wasn't a threat to us, despite Dick Cheney and his daughter's best attempts to convince the public otherwise. I'm also sure our American media will give both of them ample time on the air to make those criticisms.

When we quit building and occupying Vatican City sized embassies in Iraq and Afghanistan we can do more than pretend we really have any intention of getting our military out of either country.

BLITZER: A bloody wave of violence is washing over Iraq with scores of people across the country killed in a series of gruesome bombings this past week. And it all comes only days before U.S. forces are scheduled to withdraw from all major Iraqi cities.

Let's go to Baghdad, CNN's Michael Ware, who's standing by. The deadline is Tuesday for U.S. combat forces to leave the cities. Michael, what's likely to happen?

WARE: Well, on the morning of July 1st, not a great deal to be honest, Wolf. This withdrawal has been going on since January. Now you're still going to see some odd Americans out on the streets. You're going to have U.S. advisers embedded with Iraqi units. You'll still see them occasionally. There's going to be some partnered operations. There's some partner patrols, some joint events. But by and large, you're not going to see the presence of U.S. forces that we've become so accustomed to.

Because as you point out, as of Tuesday, all U.S. forces by then have to have had retreated to predesignated bases. They're allowed to operate in the green belt around Baghdad. They're allowed to around in the desert, but they're not allowed in the cities or the townships without the true commanders of the Iraq War as of Tuesday, the Iraqis.

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Bloody Bill Kristol is just outraged that President Obama wants to reduce military spending and increase domestic spending. Heaven forbid he's not playing into the fear mongering that Kristol continues with even in this segment. After Williams points out that we need some domestic spending right now and that Obama is not exactly leaving Iraq if there are going to be 50,000 troops there. Kristol follows with a bit of revisionist history and feigned outrage.

Kristol: You know, I want, we won that war and we paid great sacrifice to do so and I do not want to fritter it away because of a stupid campaign promise about a 16 month withdrawal and then an arbitrary deadline. And I think Obama is probably responsible, but...probably.

I would like for Bill Kristol to explain just how you "win" an occupation. I'd also like to know what "great personal sacrifice" he's made. As far as I can tell he's still got his money, his family, all his limbs and is doing pretty well, unlike so many of the people who got sent over there to fight this ill-conceived war that he helped get us into. So Bill Kristol you have no standing to get huffy over whether someone else is acting responsibly.

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Thomas Ricks on MTP decribes Petraus "lecturing" Obama - and admits the real winner of the war is Iran. Thanks, Heather!

David at C&L Video Cafe has already noted this Sunday how Thomas Ricks, the Washington Post's Pentagon correspondent, said on Meet The Press that "the surge succeeded militarily, failed politically" but added that "Iraqis, many of them, used the breathing space we created to step backwards to become more sectarian, become more divided." That quick addition is a convenient way to blame only Iraqis for what was widely anticipated before the surge and was put forward as the best reason not to waste more blood and treasure in Bush's sandpit by those that believed Iraqis had to confront their own problems in order to have any motivation to solve them. He also said that Afghanistan is loseable, but Pakistan isn't. (Pakistan being where the US has propped up a two-faced military dictator and lately a two-faced civilian puppet for his generals over the last eight years.)

There's none of that really controversial except to those determined to declaim "mission accomplished" at every opportunity, but in a long article for the WaPo today, Ricks diverges off into revisionist history and at times pure hagiography as he calls General Raymond Odierno the "dissenter who changed the war" and hands Odierno all the credit for thinking up the surge that is such a victory for Ricks - except when he admits it isn't.

Now, President Obama, an opponent of the war and later the surge, must deal with the consequences of the surge's success -- an Iraq that looks to be on the mend, with U.S. casualties so reduced that commanders talk about keeping tens of thousands of soldiers there for many years to come.

The most prominent advocates of maintaining that commitment are the two generals who implemented the surge and changed the direction of the war: Odierno and David H. Petraeus, who replaced Casey in 2007 as the top U.S. commander in Iraq and became the figure most identified with the new strategy. But if Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command, was the public face of the troop buildup, he was only its adoptive parent. It was Odierno, since September the U.S. commander in Iraq, who was the surge's true father.

It's ridiculous cheerleading, mainly sourced to neoconservative and real Surge co-architect Gen. Jack Keane. Over at FDL, emptywheel has a comprehensive takedown of Rick's article, which is an excerpt from Rick's forthcoming book:

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