Equally, if the problems here ultimately recede, supporters of the enterprise will find vindication in the Bush administration's decision to hold course as others lost faith.

Either way, any reckoning will examine the numbers of U.S. troops committed: Whether they were so thinly stretched that their mission was doomed from the start, or, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week, U.S. commanders were given "exactly what they've recommended" in terms of troops.

Rumsfeld has long taken a "less is more" approach to combat troop levels, and in a BBC interview last Monday, he seemed to move toward those now pressing to reduce troop levels soon. "The reason for fewer," he said, "is because ultimately it's going to be the Iraqi people who are going to prevail in this insurgency" in other words, Iraqi, not American, troops are the ones who will win the war, if it can be won.

The words seemed at least to nod to politics as opinion polls showed continuing erosion in support for the war.

In recent weeks, American Generalss in Iraq have been telling congressional visitors that the disappointing performance of many Iraqi combat units has made early departures impractical. They say it will be two years or more before Iraqis can be expected to begin replacing U.S. units as the main guarantors of security.

Commanders concerned for their careers have not thought it prudent to go further, and to say publicly what many say privately: that with U.S. troop levels 139,000 now they have been forced to play an infernal board game, constantly shuttling combat units from one war zone to another, leaving insurgent buildups unmet in some places while they deal with more urgent problems elsewhere.

Generals are not famous for wanting smaller armies. But U.S. commanders have been cautioned by the reality that the Pentagon, in a time of all-volunteer forces and plunging recruiting levels, has few if any extra troops to deploy and that there are limits to what American public opinion will bear. So the Generalss have kept quiet about troop levels.

The scope of the problem can be taken from the garrison in the Baghdad area. Major General William Webster, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, recently gave a rundown of the troops available to meet the surge of suicide bombings, buried roadside explosives and ambushes that have killed more than 600 people in the city since the new Shiite majority government took office in early May: 27,000 U.S. troops, 15,000 Iraqi policemen and 7,000 Iraqi soldiers.

Saddam Hussein, he said, had a regular garrison for the same area of 80,000 troops and 50,000 police.

Saddam ran a totalitarian state and had to worry about invasions, so direct comparisons can be misleading. Still, the fact that a U.S. General had the statistics at his fingertips told its own story. The pattern of thin force levels seems to be replicated, in differing ways, almost everywhere Americans confront insurgents. The exceptions have been those occasions, like the battles that restored government control of Najaf last August and Falluja in November, when U.S. commanders concentrated thousands of troops to crush the rebels.

But high-intensity operations like the one at Falluja are like driving a stake into a hornets' nest, many U.S. officers say. They scatter the insurgents, who regroup and return as soon as U.S. troop concentrations are reduced. Seven months after Falluja was recaptured, in ruins, pockets of insurgents still operate in the city.

U.S. commanders, their Army bottom-heavy with support units, have at most 60,000 U.S. and allied combat soldiers available, and only a fraction as many Iraqi soldiers rated combat-ready. Recent U.S. intelligence estimates put the insurgents' strength from 12,000 to 20,000.

In some cases, American commanders say, the problem can be too many U.S. troops, not too few. General George Casey Jr., the top U.S. officer in Iraq, has said that U.S. forces, while stabilizing in some areas, can be destabilizing in others, by encouraging Iraqis to depend too heavily on outsiders.

It is a lesson learned in Iraqi Kurdistan, where U.S. officers concluded that helping to resolve political disputes tended to keep the Kurds from working out their differences themselves.

It is a conviction, too, among some U.S. officers in the field, who complain that newly trained Iraqi troops often malinger on operations, confident that Americans will step in where they fail.

But whether there are too many U.S. soldiers or too few, a feeling is growing among senior officers in Baghdad and Washington that it is only a matter of time before the Pentagon sets a timetable of its own for withdrawal. These officers point to the effect on American public opinion of the slow disintegration of the 30-nation, U.S.-led coalition, and to frustration on Capitol Hill with the faltering buildup of Iraqi forces. These officers also cite the recruiting slump and fear that the risk is growing that the war, like Vietnam, will do lasting damage to the Army and the Marines.

"I think the drawdown will occur next year, whether the Iraqi security forces are ready or not," a senior marine officer in Washington said last week. "Look for covering phrases like 'We need to start letting the Iraqis stand on their own feet, and that isn't going to happen until we start drawing down.'"

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