For two hours, President Bush listened to contrasting visions of the U.S. future in Iraq. Gen. David H. Petraeus dominated the conversation by video link from Baghdad, making the case to keep as many troops as long as possible to cement any security progress. Adm. William J. Fallon, his superior, argued instead for accepting more risks in Iraq, officials said, in order to have enough forces available to confront other potential threats in the region.

The polite discussion in the White House Situation Room a week ago masked a sharper clash over the U.S. venture in Iraq, one that has been building since Fallon, chief of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees Middle East operations, sent a rear admiral to Baghdad this summer to gather information. Soon afterward, officials said, Fallon began developing plans to redefine the U.S. mission and radically draw down troops.
One of those plans, according to a Centcom officer, involved slashing U.S. combat forces in Iraq by three-quarters by 2010. In an interview, Fallon disputed that description but declined to offer details. Nonetheless, his efforts offended Petraeus's team, which saw them as unwelcome intrusion on their own long-term planning. The profoundly different views of the U.S. role in Iraq only exacerbated the schism between the two men.
""Bad relations?"" said a senior civilian official with a laugh. ""That's the understatement of the century. . . . If you think Armageddon was a riot, that's one way of looking at it.""
For Bush, the eight months since announcing his ""new way forward"" in Iraq have been about not just organizing a major force deployment but also managing a remarkable conflict within his administration, mounting a rear-guard action against Congress and navigating a dysfunctional relationship with an Iraqi leadership that has proved incapable of delivering what he needs.
Although the administration has presented a united front, senior officials remain split over whether Bush's strategy will work in the long term. Bush gambled that a ""surge"" of 30,000 troops in the streets of Baghdad and the western province of Anbar would establish enough security to give ""breathing space"" to Iraq's sectarian leaders to find common ground.
But as Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker deliver progress reports to Congress tomorrow, the questions they are likely to face are the same ones asked internally: How long should the troop buildup last? When should U.S. forces start to come home? Should the United States stand by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki or seek another leader? What are the hidden risks of the emerging alliance with Sunni tribal leaders? What is the best outcome Washington can hope for at this point?
Amid the uncertainty, the overriding imperative for Bush these past eight months has been to buy time -- time for the surge to work, time for the Iraqis to get their act together, time to produce progress. In Washington's efforts to come to grips with the war it unleashed, the story of these months is one of trying to control the uncontrollable. And now as a result of a casual idea by Petraeus that hardened into an unwelcome deadline, the administration finds itself at a pivotal moment.
""All the outreach and consultations did not reset as much time on the Washington clock as we had hoped,"" said Peter D. Feaver, who was a National Security Council strategic adviser until July. ""Rather than buying us more time, the D.C. clock seemed to accelerate after the president's speech.""
---------A strategy with few supporters
The president was somber as he took his place behind the lectern in the White House library the night of Jan. 10. It was an awkward address. He stood alone in the corner talking into a camera. His subdued tone, appropriate for ordering thousands more men and women into battle, worried some aides who feared it was not persuasive.
It did not take long to figure out just how unpersuasive it was. As Bush said good night and headed upstairs to bed, the reviews came in heavily negative, even among Republicans. The notion that the president was sending even more troops to Iraq after an antiwar public turned control of Congress over to the Democrats exasperated many in the capital. The visceral reaction induced near-panic among some in the White House.
""The concern of some people -- me -- was the floor was going to break politically,"" said Peter H. Wehner, then White House director of strategic initiatives. ""We put all our eggs in the surge-Petraeus basket. The speech just didn't seem to move anything, and, if anything, it seemed to deepen the problem.""
The surge was born of a review Bush launched after the midterm elections. Over the weeks that followed, the president came to agree that his strategy was heading to what he later called ""slow failure."" But rather than heed calls for withdrawal, he opted for a final gambit to eke out victory, overruling some of his commanders and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ushering in a new team led by Fallon, Petraeus, Crocker and a new defense secretary, Robert M. Gates.
The logic escaped many. The day after Bush's speech, Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were pummeled during hearings on Capitol Hill. The two tried to assure lawmakers that the troop buildup would be short-lived. ""We're thinking of it as a matter of months, not 18 months or two years,"" Gates testified. Asked about Maliki, Rice said, ""I think he knows that his government is on borrowed time.""
So was Bush. ""There was a real question about whether we'd be able to do this at all,"" said a White House aide. Within five weeks, the House had voted to oppose the troop buildup, and Democratic leaders were vowing to tie Bush's hands. Most worrisome was the discontent among Republicans. ""It could have potentially strangled this strategy in the crib,"" Wehner said.
--------Early turning points
While Bush played defense in Washington, he also needed to turn up the pressure in Baghdad. The strategy would never work, Bush aides knew, unless Maliki stepped up. National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley had outlined in a memo last fall the deep White House skepticism about the prime minister's intentions and abilities to take on Shiite militias.
Bush instituted videoconference calls with Maliki every two weeks, prodding him to seek accord among Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish factions. At first, the Americans noticed some change. Maliki, who previously had blocked U.S. forces from taking on the Mahdi Army militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, gave Petraeus the green light to go after anyone responsible for attacks. He also deployed three Iraqi brigades in Baghdad, as promised.
More striking was the emerging shift in Anbar; al-Qaeda and Sunni insurgents had grown so dominant in the western province that military intelligence had all but given up on the area months earlier. Bush benefited from good timing. As he introduced his new strategy, Marine commanders had already made common cause with local Sunni tribal leaders who had broken with the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, also called AQI.
Why the sheiks turned remains a point of debate, but it seems clear that the tribes resented al-Qaeda's efforts to ban smoking and marry local women to build ties to the region. ""Marrying women to strangers, let alone foreigners, is just not done,"" Australian Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, a Petraeus adviser, wrote in an essay.
The sheik who forged the alliance with the Americans, Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, traced the decision to fight al-Qaeda to Sept. 14, 2006, long before the new Bush strategy, but the president's plan dispatched another 4,000 U.S. troops to Anbar to exploit the situation. As security improved, the White House eagerly took credit.
The ""Anbar Awakening"" represented perhaps the most important shift in years, but it generated little debate at the White House. Long before the tribes switched sides, the administration conducted a policy exercise on how to team up with former insurgents. But when such an alliance occurred, it bubbled up from the ground with no Washington involvement. ""We're not smart enough to know the course that these matters might take,"" Rice conceded to an Australian newspaper last week.
(Source: Washington Post