First, the U.S. government has announced it is pulling out 3,500 troops that were deployed there over the past year and a half under Gen. David Petraeus' surge strategy.

Second, it has been reported that in all, 30,000 "surge" troops will be pulled out of Iraq by July.

Third, those pull-outs will followed by a 45-day "re-evaluation" of Iraq policy by U.S. decision-makers.

Fourth, the sweeping Democratic wins this week in two previously invulnerable Republican congressional districts in Illinois and Louisiana confirmed that GOP is facing an annihilating disaster - quite possibly their worst congressional drubbing since 1936 - in the 2008 U.S. general election.

And finally, following his sweeping win Tuesday in the North Carolina Democratic primary and his strong showing right behind Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., in Indiana, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., looks to be on the brink of securing the Democratic presidential nomination. And of all the three major remaining candidates, Obama is the only one who offers any serious prospect for a major U.S. policy change including almost total troop withdrawals from Iraq.

That is not to say that such sweeping changes are guaranteed if Obama wins the presidency against Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has already locked up the GOP presidential nomination. In a number of comments, the junior senator from Illinois has indicated that he believes his room for strategic maneuver on Iraq may be limited.

Obama has clearly and happily been far less prone to fake macho nuclear-weapons rattling threats than Sen. Clinton has resorted to in her campaign. But the pattern of his choice of foreign policy advisers, while cautious and moderate, has certainly been traditional and mainstream.

Nevertheless, the end result of this week's dramatic political developments in the domestic U.S. political arena is that Obama, after weeks of difficulty, primarily over his long-time association with his old pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has rebounded strongly and now looks certain of being his party's presidential candidate.

Meanwhile, Sen. McCain continues to hang tough in his conviction that the United States needs to stay in Iraq for 100 years if necessary. That means the Iraq war looks like remaining one of the two fundamental issues the presidential election will be fought on - along with the crisis-stricken U.S. economy. Obama looks likely to beat out McCain on both of them. The Arizona senator remains obstinate committed to old, tried-and-failed policies that have long lost the confidence of the American public.

Obama is also sure to exploit the windfall bonus McCain has given them by ostentatiously making the notorious Norman Podhoretz, the godfather of the neoconservatives who pushed through the invasion of Iraq and subsequent catastrophically bungled occupation, his chief foreign policy adviser.

As we predicted six months ago in these columns, 2008 looks more likely than ever to be a year of epochal change in U.S. policies on the Middle East.