An Enemy Ever More Brutal

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Those officers know that the American public won't accept 138,000 U.S. troops in Iraq for that length of time. So senior Pentagon officials are drafting withdrawal plans to take perhaps 50,000 or more Americans out of Iraq by next spring, and have begun publicly preparing Americans and Iraqis for that move. Yet no one is certain Iraq's security forces will be capable of taking over the job by then. Talk of even partial withdrawal could boomerang by galvanizing the insurgents. And a total pullout is still a long way off. Many military experts say a rush to the exit would lead to chaos in the country, civil war and even a new base camp for al-Qaeda in the region. Those concerns were given new life last week when al-Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, warned that the U.S. would fail in Iraq exactly the way it did in Vietnam. And that's a prospect that none of the parties, in the U.S. or Iraq, could abide. --With reporting by Christopher Allbritton and Tim McGirk/Baghdad, Sally B. Donnelly/Washington and Christopher Maag/Cleveland