The move will see 5,700 U.S. troops returned home "by Christmas" and five of the 20 combat brigades in Iraq pulled out by July 2008 -- leaving roughly 130,000 troops in place. Bush, in essence, used his speech to put a political spin on the cautious optimism of Petraeus' assessment of the military situation in Iraq.

Two developments will proceed from this point. First, the Democratic Congress will do what it can to hobble Bush's plans without limiting financial support for U.S. forces in Iraq. The Democrats sense that the Bush administration will hang itself on the Iraq issue, and with elections only a short year away, they are more than willing to extend him the rope they think he needs to do it. That strategy was launched within two minutes of the president's speech with a rebuttal from Nevada Sen. Harry Reid -- in which he made abundantly clear that the Democrats will attempt to hold on to what they see as the moral high ground without seriously pushing for actions that would hamper the military.

Second, the Bush administration will need to generate a new strategy for Iraq that uses fewer forces. In that vein, far more interesting than the president's speech was his mention earlier in the day of using Korea as a model for ongoing changes in the U.S. Iraq deployment.

The Korean option would aim to provide the United States with the best of both worlds: The Iraqis would be responsible for all issues of internal security, with U.S. forces called upon only if the country were invaded. U.S. forces would be well positioned to prevent Iran from ever taking advantage of the weakness of its neighbor and thereby permanently prevent Tehran from extending its control south to the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.

Additionally, any offensive capabilities of the Iraqi military -- whether that military be an integrated multiethnic institution or a series of different entities linked to the country's three dominant ethnicities -- would be under de facto U.S. control. Among the consequences of this is that the United States alone would determine what military hardware the Iraqi military possessed, and therefore what offensive capabilities it sported. That, perhaps more than anything else, would guarantee that the United States could always command Iran's attention -- and its caution.

There are, however, two problems with the Korean strategy (aside from the fact that this would be a multidecade U.S. troop commitment). First, when the Korean War ended, the Allied forces were clearly the only meaningful ones in the country, and the South Koreans were broadly grateful for their presence. These forces were able to easily reconstruct the Korean military and government in whatever image they chose before leaving the details to the Koreans -- a rather tightly knitted ethnicity.

The reality of the South Korea of 1953 is certainly not reflected in the Iraq of 2007, where there is a militia for every street block, ethnic splits pervade and, after four years, the United States has yet to successfully form a meaningful internal security mechanism. There will be no Korean-style deployments in the heart of Iraqi population centers. After all, the whole idea of a redefinition of the Iraqi redeployment -- in the president's own words -- would be to allow for an anti-Iranian deterrent while minimizing U.S. exposure beyond training and counterterrorism operations.

Second, in Korea, U.S. forces were stationed on the trip wire, just south of the Demilitarized Zone -- an area with absolutely no transnational traffic -- so that any attack against South Korea would automatically include within it an attack against U.S. positions. For that to work in Iraq, U.S. forces would need to be stationed in a long, thin line on the heavily traveled and highly porous Iran-Iraq border.

Instead, the United States would much prefer to station its troops out in the western desert or along the Saudi border. That would be a safer position, but certainly not a trip wire to protect Iraq; instead, it would protect Saudi Arabia.

This means that should Iran move into Iraq with something less than a massive invasion, there would not necessarily be an "automatic" U.S. response. For example, would the U.S. sound the charge if only 2,000 Iranian troops crossed the border in order to assert control over territory lost during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war? What if several thousand crossed over to wreak havoc in Sunni areas?

When the trip wire is not on the right border, the opportunities for equivocation and appeasement are many.