General Petraeus successfully argued within the administration for more time to continue the Sisyphean task of putting Iraq back on its feet and keeping it from splitting apart, but this position pitted him against many senior military officials who believe the stress on the Army and Marines requires a more rapid drawdown sooner. Congress is likely to continue attempts to force a more rapid reduction in the U.S. commitment. Petraeus and his inner circle don’t dispute the fact that the Army and Marines are strained. But one of his advisers, chairman of the social sciences department at West Point Professor Mike Meese, argues that while it will take years to recover from the loss of captains and noncoms worn out by the war, “leaving Iraq in the wrong way so it appears to be a failure will have a decades-long impact.”

The announcement of the drawdown sets in motion a chain reaction that will be difficult to predict. The risk of “rushing to failure” considerable, given that the positive trends are incipient and reversible and the Iraqi government has still not clearly embraced the Sunnis’ wish to come in from the cold. The really thorny question is how fast to draw down the remaining 15 combat brigades. The game plan is one brigade every 45 days, conditions permitting. Lt. Gen. Odierno argues that to draw down more quickly now jeopardizes the chances for consolidating the initial gains won by the surge. “If you tell me today, we are going to go down to ten brigades in six months, I believe that’s a failed failed strategy,” he told me in early September. “We will not accomplish our goals that I see here in Iraq. If you ask me that six months from now, I might give you a different answer.”

The most significant (and underreported) development has been the U.S. recruitment of thousands of Sunnis to serve as U.S.-paid security guards, which the Iraqi army is now permitted to work alongside. This is not just an Anbar phenomenon. In an interview Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the three-star commander of the Multinational Corps, told me that some 15,000 Iraqi volunteers have been contracted by U.S. battalions in greater Baghdad (Ameriya, Ghazaliya, Adhamiya, Taji, Radwaniya, Abu Ghraib, Yusifiyah) and provinces to the north. That is as many as have been recruited in Anbar. The volunteers I talked to in southern and western Baghdad see this as their best chance to secure their neighborhoods and to become part of the Iraqi security forces. They still distrust the Iraqi government, but they now see the U.S. military as their best bulwark against further sectarian attacks. Many of these groups once fought both American and Iraqi forces, but they have responded readily to the chance to the come in from the cold.

But the United States must remain forcefully engaged, outline a clear political strategy and offer some creative new mechanisms. The Maliki government may or may not survive, but Crocker and others I interviewed believe that many months would be lost, at an absolutely critical time, in the effort to form a new government.

What hope of success is there? The war in Iraq will have an ending, and the United States’ choice is to influence it or not. Despite the intense U.S. partisan politics surrounding the war, the bedrock reality is that Iraq is simply too important to walk away from. The best reason to believe that further progress might be made is the sheer doggedness of Petraeus and Crocker. Petraeus, unlike previous commanders here, does not shy away from locking horns and pounding tables on the political issues. And Crocker is a professional who has finally assembled a team of top-flight talent that has been missing the entire war, for what is really a peace-making venture. The next best reason is a second tier of well-intentioned Iraqi officials such as Barham Salih and Iyad Samarrai, who crafted the August 26 accord with U.S. help. Additional deadlines and markers imposed by Congress could help move this Sisyphean project along. But with or without progress, 2008 will be, finally, a year of transition.