US commander in Iraq must devise a five-star pullout plan

Before 2004, General George Casey had never been in combat and had only scant experience with the Middle East. But President George W. Bush nominated him anyway to one of the hardest jobs in the world: command of the US military effort in Iraq.

Two years later, he is still in command, and while the shift in strategy that General Casey has overseen has generally been praised, the violence in Iraq continues to spiral out of control.

US strategy in Iraq is created and implemented by a huge cast of characters including the White House, the Defence Department, the State Department, the army, the marine corps and Central Command. But General Casey has become the public face of the US occupation for the past two years, and has played a vital role in both its successes and failures.

After an easy invasion in 2003 and a relatively quiet occupation for several months, by 2004 the situation in Iraq had spiralled out of control. In the spring, Sunni extremists in Fallujah ambushed four American private security guards, killed them, strung the bodies from a bridge, then took them down and burned them. The attack was filmed and the footage shocked Americans. The US military attempted to root insurgents out of the city, but failed.

Shortly thereafter, it emerged that US military prison guards had been humiliating Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, creating a public relations catastrophe for the military.

In Washington, the administration had begun to lose faith in Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, then commander of American forces in Iraq, and thought that General John Abizaid, a highly regarded Lebanese-American in charge of the US military across the Middle East, was spending too much of his energy on Iraq.