In recent weeks, American negotiators in Baghdad concluded that it would be impossible to obtain that protection, essentially scuttling any chance of a substantial troop presence there next year.
A more plausible strategy, devoted to managing as successfully as possible the informal sectarian partition of Iraq which is already well under way, has again been postponed, along with substantial troop reductions.
Though his deputy said Mr. Hadley was chiefly expressing support, one option widely discussed before his trip, according to American and Iraqi officials, was a substantial troop increase in Baghdad by both countries.
No matter who is president, the United States will still find itself deeply enmeshed in the affairs of Afghanistan, even if in the next few years there are substantial troop withdrawals from Iraq.
Gates made a more political point: that if there were no prospects for gradual but substantial troop withdrawals, popular support for the war would evaporate, and the next president would probably pull out all the troops as quickly as possible, resulting in Iraq's potential collapse.
WASHINGTON — A string of successful operations recently killing or capturing high-level figures from Al Qaeda, particularly in the tribal areas of Pakistan, has fueled the argument inside the Obama administration about the necessity of a substantial troop buildup in Afghanistan, officials said.
But administration officials said they did not expect major changes in the Afghan strategy to emerge from the review, suggesting that the White House would not move swiftly to resolve the tension between the military's pleas for patience and the demands from Democrats for substantial troop withdrawals starting next summer.
Since then, the declaration has not been used, although the United States since World War II has waged wars requiring substantial troop commitments for 32 out of the last 72 years (including Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm and the jihadist wars).
Unlike their Spanish, Portuguese and French competitors, these colonisers possessed no religious orders, no substantial shock troops of professionally single males who could compile masses of information on indigenous peoples and devote themselves full-time to converting them to Christianity.
With such losses, it is hard to accept that the US war in Afghanistan will end without a decisive victory, but keeping substantial American troops present in the country indefinitely will confer no real political or strategic advantages – while risking death and injury to even more young Americans.
