Throughout his campaign for president, Barack Obama consistently said that if elected, on day one, he would sit down with his top military commanders and give them a new mission: begin to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Iraq in 16 months. “Let me be as clear as I can be: I intend to end this war,” Obama said last July. “I have seen no information that contradicts the notion that we can bring our troops out safely at a pace of one to two brigades per month.”

Indeed, Obama has in fact, scheduled a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top military commanders next Wednesday, his first full day in office. Today on ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos noted the meeting and asked Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod if Obama intends to keep his promise, and order the 16 month withdrawal timetable. Axerod answered, “yes”:

AXELROD: Well, that was something that he’s consistently said. He believes that that is a reasonable timetable. We’ve moved a great distance from the time he started talking about that. And now, we’re in an area where everyone agrees we should be on a path to withdrawing those troops and he is going to begin that process as promised on that day.

STEPHANOPOULOS: He’ll give the command?

AXELROD: Yes.

Watch it:

This news may come as a shock to Vice President Dick Cheney, who recently suggested that Obama “overcome” his “campaign rhetoric” when it comes to his criticism of the Bush administration’s security policies. Just last week, Cheney warned against what he called an “irresponsible withdrawal” from Iraq:

CHENEY: I think there’s still a lot of work to be done there. [...] I hear a lot of people among our critics who keep saying, Iraq’s a mess, pull out. Well, that’s not true. It’s not a mess. We have had major progress. We have come close to achieving a significant portion of our objectives. And an irresponsible withdrawal now is exactly the wrong medicine.

But, in fact, the Pentagon has already begun planning for Obama’s Iraq withdrawal timeline. “Our military planners do not live in a vacuum,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said last week. “They are well aware that the president-elect campaigned on withdrawing troops from Iraq on a 16-month timeline, so it would be only prudent of them to draw up plans that reflected that option.”

Earlier this week, President-elect Obama attended a 3-hour dinner party with conservatives at columnist George Will’s house, followed by an hour-long coffee meeting with liberal columnists at his transition offices. Though the conversations were off-the-record, some of the participants — Will, Bill Kristol and EJ Dionne — praised Obama on the Sunday shows this morning for how he approached the meetings.

“Suffice to say that I think he was impressive and probably we weren’t,” said Will on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Both Kristol, a conservative, and Dionne, a liberal, remarked that Obama came off as a “calm” professor when they spoke to him:

KRISTOL: You know, he is privately — this wasn’t really private — but you know, among nine or ten people, he wasn’t really that different from the way he is publicly, you know. Cool, calm, confident. He was like talking to a very intelligent, moderately liberal law professor, you know, debating a bunch of issues.” [Fox News Sunday]

DIONNE: The really striking thing is, it was like we’re around a table and it was like Professor Obama teaching a seminar on how you deal with whole lot of crises at the same time and stay calm. I mean, it was very sort of focused and easy going in the midst of all of this. [ABC'S This Week]

“He is remarkably calm, I found that last week,” added Stephanopoulos, who interviewed Obama last week. Watch it: