Yet Gen. George Casey, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, told a classified briefing at the Pentagon last week that the number of U.S. combat brigades in Iraq is projected to be cut by more than 60 percent over the next 18 months, from its current level of 14 to only five or six, the New York Times reported Monday.

By the end of 2007, according to Gen. Casey's reported projections, "the United States would still have responsibility for the Iraqi capital and the area west of Baghdad," the New York Times said.

The reported massive troop cuts fit what United Press International's veteran White House correspondent Richard Tomkins described as President Bush's new policy of "Iraqi-ization" after the president's White House conference earlier this month.

The domestic U.S. political rationale for the troop cut is clear. It can be portrayed as good news to the American people that more than half the U.S. troops in Iraq will be coming home within 18 months. And the White House can also be expected to spin the line that the troops are able to come home because Iraqi-ization is working, and larger areas of Iraq are able to operate without U.S. forces being there.

In a global context, the more U.S. combat brigades that can be withdrawn rapidly from Iraq, the more the U.S. Army, Marines, their Reserve Forces and the U.S. National Guard will feel an easing of the unanticipated massive pressures and over-extension they have suffered in the three years since Iraq was occupied and the Sunni insurgency began.

The problems with the projected withdrawals, however, far outweigh the benefits.

Had the withdrawals been announced as part of a plan for an eventual full U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq, they would certainly have made strategic sense. But instead, Bush and the Senate vote have both made clear that the United States is determined to remain a powerful military presence in Iraq for the indefinite future.

That means continuing U.S. forces in Iraq will be increasingly vulnerable and unable to exert even the temporary and strained influence they currently can around the country.

The strategic rationale for the troop withdrawal is that the Sunni insurgency is only serious in Baghdad and two western provinces. It is far reduced, marginal, or non-existent in the other 16 provinces.

At the moment, that is in fact the case. But it is very possible that the more U.S. forces are removed from other provinces of Iraq, the more anti-American forces will gain control in them. That has already been the case throughout Shiite majority southern Iraq as anti-American militas have quietly extended their power without yet clashing head-on with U.S. forces.

Also, the more the U.S. military presence in Iraq is reduced, the more U.S. political power in Baghdad, even over the new, relatively pro-American, government of Maliki, is likely to rapidly diminish.

U.S. pressure was exerted to topple Maliki's predecessor Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari precisely because he was too close to Iran and to Iran's main ally in Iraq, firebrand, anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia.

But Jaafari's alliance with Sadr and other independent Shiite militias at least gave his fragile government and security forces real allies who controlled real population and territory. Maliki cannot depend on even the tacit support of the Shiite militias as Jaafari did, unless he risks alienating his American sponsors.

The key problem in Iraq remains the lack of any effective state structure to replace the Baathist totalitarian one of Saddam Hussein that was smashed by the U.S. invasion and occupation of March-April 2003. As a confidential memorandum from U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalizad that was leaked to the Washington Post and published by it on June 18 detailed with remarkable frankness, U.S. forces in Baghdad and the new Iraqi government cannot even guarantee the safety of key Iraqi staff working in the central Green Zone and in the U.S. Embassy there.

The Bush administration's troop withdrawal plan is predicated on many assumptions. It assumes that large areas of Iraq currently controlled by U.S. forces will smoothly revert to central Iraqi government control when those American troops pull out.

It assumes that the Sunni insurgents will be unable to replicate their previous strategy of returning to reoccupy cities, towns and villages from which they were previously cleared.

And it assumes that the Iraqi central government will be able to establish a credible control at the expense of the Shiite militias that currently do exercise the real direct power in most of the country where the 60 percent Shiite majority live.

The new U.S. plan also assumes that the U.S. government will not lose much of its remaining power to influence events in Iraq by removing so much of its physical presence there.

If Gen. Casey's reported troop reduction were the prelude to a full-scale withdrawal of all U.S. troops, such as President Richard Nixon, his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and his Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird had completed from South Vietnam by the end of 1972, it would make coherent strategic sense.

But if the withdrawal is based on the assumptions listed above, and if it also assumes a significant continued U.S. military presence in Iraq and dominant political role in Baghdad, then it is likely to prove a short-lived and very dangerous fantasy.

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