Bush's plan relies even more than past stratagems on a weak Iraqi government to fulfill promises it's repeatedly broken to take on sectarian militias and end political squabbles.
It calls for Iraqis to strengthen their forces in Baghdad to help quell raging violence there, four months after the Iraqi government failed to contribute four of the six battalions of troops it promised to a similar security effort.
The plan calls for reordering Iraq's Interior Ministry, something U.S. officials have been insisting on since last spring, when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki came to office.
The biggest course change is the declaration that Iraqis will be in charge of the effort to secure Baghdad, which Al-Maliki has been pushing for.
Bush aides, who detailed the plan in a series of documents and briefings, insisted that this time is different. Al-Maliki has pledged to deploy more Iraqi forces to stabilize Baghdad, and the full U.S. troop contingent and financial-aid package won't flow unless he follows through on that and other steps, the aides said.
But if Al-Maliki fails to deliver, the president appears to have little leverage other than to bring U.S. troops home.
"An awful lot depends on the Iraqis. We don't control the Iraqis anymore," said Daniel Serwer, a vice president of the government-funded U.S. Institute of Peace.
Bush for the first time Wednesday said the U.S. commitment in Iraq isn't open-ended -- though he put no time limit on how long Americans would wait to see whether Al-Maliki fulfilled his promises.
Outside analysts said they saw some positive elements in the plan, such as a focus on protecting Iraqi civilians and jump-starting the economy from the grass roots -- both classic elements of counterinsurgency doctrine. Bush proposes almost $1.2 billion in new economic assistance in Iraq and a doubling of U.S. civil-military reconstruction teams.
But many said they feared Bush's modified tactics are too little and too late to make up for past blunders in Iraq. Those include invading with too few troops, disbanding the Iraqi army, underestimating the cost of the venture and misjudging the rapid growth of Iraq's insurgency.
"The problem is the solutions applied three years ago or two years ago might have stabilized the situation. ... I find it hard to see they will apply today," said Judith Yaphe, a Persian Gulf expert at the National Defense University.
The core of Bush's "New Way Forward" is a bid to end the endemic violence in Baghdad by deploying 17,500 more U.S. troops and thousands of additional Iraqi troops and police and adopting new rules of engagement.
White House officials said Iraqi forces would take the lead, with U.S. troops embedded in Iraqi units.
That's been tried before -- and failed -- in last summer's joint effort to bring security to Baghdad, called "Operation Forward Together."
For the new plan to work, the Iraqi government must crack down on both Sunni and Shiite extremists, top military officials in Baghdad said.
