"Exit with honour" is becoming a new buzzword as the Bush administration realizes it doesn't have support for an open-ended commitment to keeping large numbers of troops on the ground in Iraq.

An excerpt from The Globe and Mail story:

State Secretary Condoleezza Rice, one of the few senior figures surrounding President George W. Bush to have retained high levels of both popularity and credibility, was the latest to offer tantalizing hints that far fewer U.S. soldiers and marines will be slogging it out in Iraq next Thanksgiving.

Shaping the debate and shifting the public's focus from a decisive victory into an exit with honour reflect new political realities in Iraq and the United States. Ending the occupation could pay political dividends for politicians in both Baghdad and Washington.

"As soon as Iraqi forces are ready, we want to see a reduction in our own forces, and I think those days are going to be coming fairly soon," Ms. Rice said, a message she repeated several times in interviews this week.

Already, more than 20,000 U.S. soldiers and marines are due to leave Iraq in the new year, cutting the current force of nearly 160,000 to 138,000. But that cut is a mirage because military commanders deliberately overlapped the rotation of several brigades to boost the number of soldiers to near record high levels ahead of December's parliamentary election. Any real cutting would take the number of U.S. troops down toward or below the 100,000 level.

It's not just U.S. troops headed home. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said yesterday that he wants to pull all 3,000 of his country's soldiers out of Iraq by the end of next year, a goal that he said has been cleared both with the Iraqi government and the United States.

Britain is expected to announce sharp cuts -- maybe by as much 50 per cent -- after the Dec. 15 Iraqi election. Most British troops are deployed in the relatively quiet southern provinces of Iraq where Shiites dominate.

The sudden rush to talk about withdrawal reflects a new political calculus. While Mr. Bush still calls Iraq the central front in the global war against violent Islamic extremism, there is a growing realization that the presence of U.S. troops is part of the problem.

Reducing troop levels while not being seen to cut and run is critical to the Bush administration, both to justify the war and to avert the very real possibility of Iraq sliding into a full-blown civil war.

Even Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admits it's a delicate balance. "One of the tensions that exists is to have enough forces to see that we can contribute to security as the Iraqi security forces continue to be built up, but also not to have too many forces that you contribute to the arguments that the insurgents make that there's some sort of an occupation taking place."