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...troop levels can be confounding: Bush made the trip in part to pressure a reluctant Congress to permit his 30,000-troop surge, announced in January, to continue a while longer. And yet it was Bush who, during his brief visit to Anbar, hinted openly that troop withdrawals might begin soon. He told reporters that General David Petraeus informed him that "if the security situation continues to improve the way it has, we may be able to achieve the same objectives with fewer troops...
...that Iraq has a way of reducing what was once solid and certain into sand. Lawmakers from both parties expected September to be a month of reckoning for the President's Iraq policy - a stop-or-go moment when the U.S. would decide whether to continue the surge or begin an inevitable pullback. But even before Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker utter a word to Congress, that debate looks almost moot. Bush appears ready to continue the surge for another six months or so, and the Democrats lack the votes to check him. So what will unfold instead in Washington...
...antiwar flank, none of the Democratic efforts have yet attracted lasting bipartisan support. The few that have come close fall well short of veto-proof margins. The best proposals, like the plan developed by Democratic Senators Carl Levin of Michigan and Jack Reed of Rhode Island that would begin withdrawals by 120 days after passage, mustered only 52 votes, not enough to overcome a filibuster or override a veto...
...Will troops start coming home? Petraeus is likely to recommend that troop levels remain constant at around 160,000 soldiers and Marines until April 2008, when a gradual redeployment will begin. The drawdown process will seem agonizingly slow, and that's because it will be - one 3,500-strong brigade and its supporting personnel a month. The timing is strategic and political. Pentagon personnel predict a massive drop in recruiting and retention in April if troops overseas aren't given long-promised breaks to go home. The political clock is ticking too. A partial springtime withdrawal would permit the White...
...Whenever they begin, then, the withdrawals are unlikely to last very long. Many experts believe the threat of a wider civil war - and the regional instability that would follow - means that the U.S. cannot afford to reduce its presence in Iraq much below 130,000 troops for the next year and probably beyond that. And so it could turn out that just six months after the long-awaited drawdowns begin, they stop again. The remaining forces, Pentagon officials report, will give the Army some badly needed margin to rest and retrain its brigades, but only a little. Some officers...