Thanks for that Jen, I hadn't even considered the implications of having no standard operating procedures in addition to no congressional oversight.  Oh yeah, and no media.  I mean, this isn't some hidden story - it was on freakin' C-Span.  We either have to assume that not a single journalist or news room assistant in the entire country watched c-span that day, or that they did and by some unfathomable stretch of group denial just don't see it as being newsworthy.  I'm not sure which scares me more...

"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense.
N o t h i n g would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't.
and contrarily wise, what is, it wouldn't be.  And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?"

- Lewis Carroll 

When George Bush talks about US withdrawal, he is describing not simply a removal of troops, but rather a complete abandonment Iraq in order to paint an unappealing image of the peace movement.  This is disingenuous and he knows it.  Troops represent only a portion of US efforts, and even then stand as a mere fraction of tactics and strategies under which we may prove beneficial. 

In this way, I take issue with your suggestion that troops are necessary to enforce will.  In fact, I believe this kind of thinking is precisely the reason that things have spun out of control in Iraq.  For one thing, our 'will' is far from altruistic.  We are not there now nor have we ever been there to help the Iraqi people. Our will from the beginning has been to remake Iraq in our own image.  The fact that this has come at the end of a gun barrel has not proven helpful against people with conflicting visions, while our brutal and ill-conceived displacement of more than 1 million Iraqi non-combatants has only increased the influence such people have.

In a more broad sense, I object to the notion that 'enforcement' is necessary in order to promote interest.  We all learned - hopefully at an early age - that people tend to respond poorly to violence. Yet somehow we citizens of the world are all too willing to surrender our security to those who know nothing of human nature.  If they did, they would be a lot smarter in trying to achieve their goals, good or bad.  You want to plunder oil at below market value?   Empower a dictator to sell it to you.  You want to overthrow a dictator?  Teach his people that they do not need to be slaves.  In either case, sending in people with guns seems like the worst possible way to go about it.

 The thing is, people try nonviolence for a week and, when it fails, go straight back to violence which has failed for thousands of years.  Right now we have an insurgency made up of approximately 40+ rival "gangs".  With all the cash and guns that we introduced to the country, they suddenly find themselves funded and organized.  Moreover, we've given them the perfect scapegoat (ourselves) through which to convince exponentially greater support among the population.  The presence of troops has effectively inserted itself as a causal factor.  And such recursion virtually guarantees an exponential degeneration.

As far as what we can actually do besides troops, I could think of a hundred different things just off the top of my head.  The first would be to surrender to and provide active support and ample financing to an independent multi-governmental/NGO partnership dedicated to helping the Iraqi people bring stability to their own country.  Such a group would invariably need to have some means of support in order to aid in security and intelligence investigations towards neutralizing militant Sunni jihadists and helping the Iraqi majority defend itself against attacks.  However, this would resemble policing rather that militarism and would be but one small aspect of an organization which relies on good works and patience to slowly build up support among the population. 

We are going to have spent nearly $1trillion USD on a military presence that has become its own worst enemy.   Just imagine how many schools, hospitals, bridges, power plants, etc. that money can buy.  I defy you to tell me who is going to support some deranged militant against the people responsible for giving them clean, running water and a steady supply of antibiotics.