During his presidential campaign, Bush rarely discussed events in Iraq beyond the Jan. 30 election, depicting the ballot as the peak of the U.S. effort there. He would say that the training of Iraqi forces was on schedule and the U.S. troop presence could start to be drawn down once adequate Iraqi police and army forces were trained.
"We're going to train troops -- and we are. We'll have 125,000 trained by the end of December," Bush said in a debate with Democratic challenger Sen. John F. Kerry in October. "Our plan is working. We're going to make elections and Iraq is going to be free, and America will be better off for it."
By contrast, Bush on Monday laid out a political timetable for next year. It includes the Jan. 30 elections to a transitional national assembly, ratification of a new constitution in October and election of a permanent government in December.
Some former administration and congressional officials said the president was trying to change Americans' expectations of what lies ahead in Iraq.
"He's clearly moving people's time horizon and understanding of the process," said James Dobbins, Bush's former envoy to Afghanistan who now directs the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the Rand Corp. "It's prudent to clear up the misunderstanding that previous statements may have created that this election in January is a watershed event after which everything will change for the better."
Dobbins said Bush wants to "begin preparing people for the more likely event, which is the insurgency does not diminish, the violence does not subside and the casualty rate does not go down."
Michael O'Hanlon, a former Congressional Budget Office national security expert and a foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, said the president "was honest in a way he couldn't be all year."
"He admitted that it's not going that well," O'Hanlon said. "The spin machine didn't let them say that during the race."
In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion, American commanders said that no more than 30,000 U.S. troops would be needed on the ground by the end of 2003 and that Iraqi forces would provide security for the elections. But Bush acknowledged Monday that there have been problems training Iraqi forces.
"I would call the results mixed in terms of standing up Iraqi units who are willing to fight," Bush said. "There have been some cases where when the heat got on, they left the battlefield. That's unacceptable.... On the other hand, there were some really fine units in Fallouja, for example, in Najaf, that did their duty."
