In private conversations, U.S. military officers also have expressed concern that trying to maintain current troop levels in Iraq beyond next year could irreparably harm recruitment efforts and retention levels -- the lifeblood of America's volunteer military.
Still, those following the events in Iraq question Bush's upbeat characterization of Iraqi forces and caution that placing so many of his political chips on a strong performance from Iraq's fledgling troops carries its own dangers. Such forecasts have been made previously, and each time the military found itself unable to escape its role on the front lines against Iraqi insurgents.
As the U.S.-led coalition prepared to hand political power to an interim Iraqi government in June 2004, several commanders said they expected U.S. troops would be able to move to the sidelines as Iraqi troops stepped up to defend the country. Earlier this year, as the Pentagon began refocusing its mission on training Iraqi troops, again the military said it expected to step back from major counterinsurgency missions.
Yet, on both occasions, Iraqi troops proved to be unprepared and U.S. forces found themselves once again leading dangerous missions in remote Iraqi villages and nighttime raids on the streets of Baghdad.
As the development of Iraq's fragile democracy failed to defuse the insurgency or reduce the attacks on U.S. forces, senior commanders in Iraq this year began publicly lowering expectations about what the U.S. military would be able to achieve before beginning a gradual withdrawal.
They stopped defining the goal of defeating the insurgency as their mission, and began focusing on building a capable Iraqi army that could take on insurgents after U.S. troops had left the country.
"The day after the [parliamentary] elections, the insurgency will still be there," a senior military official in Baghdad told The Times in January. "And it will continue for several years to come."
But commanders over the course of several months began citing progress by Iraqi troops, and during the spring and early summer Casey said a number of times that he believed improvements could lead to a "substantial reduction" of U.S. forces in 2006.
In June, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld began to endorse the view of his commanders. However long U.S. troops stay, Rumsfeld told Congress, remnants of a well-armed insurgency will continue to fight them.
