WASHINGTON - Just as it's hard to see the real America from the nation's capital, it's also difficult to see Iraq from here. You can't smell it or taste it or feel the tar-like gluey mud that clings to your boots and gets on and in everything. You can't feel the damp winter cold that seeps into your bones on long desert nights.

So I set out after Christmas for a visit to U.S. Central Command forward headquarters in Qatar and on to Iraq with the Centcom commander, Gen. John Abizaid. That was followed by three weeks embedded with American soldiers and Marines in seven different areas -- the "Triangle of Death" south of Baghdad; Fallujah; al-Asad; the Q-West base south of Mosul; Mosul; Tal Afar; and Sinjar.

There was no "minder" or escort from headquarters to get in the way or put a spin on what I saw or heard.

Everywhere I went our troops were working hard, long days everyday, seven days a week. Some were on their second or third yearlong deployment to the war zone. Some talked of getting out when they got home, more in sadness than anger.

In some places the news was bad: The insurgents had surged back into rural areas of the Triangle when a unit responsible for the area hunkered down in their outposts and left it to the enemy. Now a successor unit was fighting hard to take the countryside back and was suffering casualties almost every day.

In other areas, the news was good: In less than six months Marines of the 2nd Regimental Combat Team in al-Asad and soldiers of the Army's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment have taken back the towns and cities along a broad swath of the western part of Iraq, along the Syrian border. The ability of insurgents to smuggle weapons and foreign fighters through a once unguarded border and mount attacks has fallen.

More than 50 new Iraq border police forts, each with at least two dozen troops, have opened along the border with Syria. With good communications and rapid reaction forces ready to come to their aid, the border police have become more aggressive, the American commanders told me.

In the ancient city of Tal Afar, where insurgents last summer blew up all the Iraqi police stations and drove the police out of town, there is almost an air of peace. New police stations have been built. More than 1,500 policemen are back on duty.

The Americans were working closely with the Iraqi police and the Iraqi army as well as local municipal officials.

Al-Asad and Tal Afar both required aggressive combined action to take back and clear out insurgents, most of them local Sunnis. The population was evacuated through a single point, and suspected insurgents were arrested. Once an area was cleared the Americans, operating with the Iraqi army and police, came down hard on all who fought back. The death toll was in the hundreds, commanders said, and collateral damage was minimal when compared to the assault on Fallujah.

That said, the formula requires a lot of American troops, 5,000-plus in each of the regimental teams, plus helicopter gun ships, Air Force fighters with their deadly JDAM-guided bombs and the ubiquitous unmanned aerial vehicles which hang overhead hour after hour pinpointing the insurgents and their activities.

The Americans are not going to be there forever, not in those kinds of numbers. One senior military official told me that he expected the U.S. force in Iraq -- which was more than 160,000 as recently as the December elections -- to drop to about 100,000 before the end of this year.

For this to work the departing Americans must be replaced by trained, competent and well-led Iraqi army and police units who learn to see themselves first as Iraqis, and then as members of a particular tribal and ethnic group. It is the same lesson that the politicians scrabbling for power in Baghdad need to learn as well, if there is even going to be an Iraq much longer.

Already the ranks of American forces are thinning. The recently arrived 101st Airborne Division, headquartered at Forward Operating Base Speicher outside Tikrit, has assumed command of all U.S. operations north of Baghdad. That's a huge chunk of territory.

Gen. Abizaid, who wants to continue as Centcom commander for a fourth year, said in a conversation that his hope for 2006 would be for "freedom of maneuver and patience."

He's going to need a lot of that, both in Washington and in Baghdad. The trouble is with the patience part. It's in short supply among Americans who are beginning to ask if we will ever get out of Iraq, and Iraqis who are asking the same question.