Pentagon sources told United Press International that neither the secretary of defense, nor Iraq theater commander Gen. John Abizaid, contemplate for a moment pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq or even significantly running them down.

Rumsfeld, they say, remains committed to wining the war, is confident U.S. forces can do it and is prepared to massively boost the U.S. troop levels and combat presence in Iraq if that is what it takes to do the job.

But Rumsfeld has certainly changed his public position on the war dramatically -- and fast.

For in the space of three days, from last Thursday, June 22, when he still airily dismissed worries about the current course of events in Iraq before the Senate Armed Services Committee to his Sunday appearance on Fox News, Rumsfeld appeared to undergo a dramatic and entirely unexpected reversal in attitudes.

For the first time in the more than two years that the insurgency has been raging, he did not confidently dismiss serious assessments that it was getting worse, not better and, at the very best projection, would take years -- perhaps as many as 12 - rather than months to suppress.

In his comments, Rumsfeld associated himself with Abizaid, who rocked Congress June 22 with his grim, unblinking assessment that the insurgency was still raging at the same intensity and with the same level of active guerrillas, as it was half a year ago, despite all the most powerful military in the world's best efforts to deal it serious blows since then.

Abizaid, ironically, gave that assessment the same day that Rumsfeld was still chipper and upbeat before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Was it Abizaid's testimony and the grim facts assessed by U.S. Army intelligence that caused Rumsfeld to change his mind? Army officers in the Pentagon, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed skepticism that this was the case. For Army Intelligence has been reliably delivering clear-eyed assessments about the deep-rooted, popular support in Sunni Muslim areas of central Iraq for the insurgency since at least August 2003, they said. And none of them appeared to dent Rumsfeld's confidence in the least.

However, Rumsfeld and his colleagues, Pentagon sources said, had been confident that the newly activated Iraqi army units unleashed on the capital Baghdad over the past month and half to crack down on the insurgents would either break their power entirely in the city of more than three million people, or at least seriously reduce their ability to carry out suicide bomb attacks and maintain previous levels of terror.

Rumsfeld genuinely believed, these sources said, that the flare up of guerrilla activity following the creation of the new Iraqi government in April was a desperate last-ditch gasp by the insurgents before they were politically isolated and forced on the defensive by the newly organized forces of the rebuilt Iraqi state.

He held to this view sincerely, week after week as the number of suicide bomb massacres of Iraqi civilians - predominantly, though by no means only, Shiites - and of Iraqi security forces continued through May and June, the sources said.

But finally, with Abizaid's testimony last week, and the fact long-time Republican supporters of the Iraq war like Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina and Rep. Walter Jones, Jr. of North Carolina were now expressing open skepticism about current U.S. policies and, in the case of Jones, even advocating a rapid pull-out, Rumsfeld was finally forced to publicly acknowledge the grim, unrelenting reality.

A report Monday in the London Times by veteran, respected correspondents Richard Beeston and James Hider, spelled out the nature of the problem confronting Rumsfeld and the undermanned U.S. forces in Iraq he for so long was convinced were sufficient to do the job.

Even though U.S. and Iraqi forces have indeed made significant inroads into the Sunni guerrilla infrastructure in the past two months, the guerrilla force is still assessed by U.S. and British military intelligence as being around 20,000 men - a formidable force.

Even worse, Beeston and Hider reported, around 1,800 idealistic jihadist volunteers from outside Iraq cross through Syria alone into the country every year - U.S. and coalition forces estimate the rate at 150 a month, Beeston and Hider wrote - and they are willing to sacrifice themselves as suicide bombers.

And at only 140,000 troops, U.S. forces in Iraq have no way of locking down Iraq's porous land borders with Syria and Iran, or even with Saudi and Jordan, whose governments oppose the insurgency but who lack the resources to prevent potential volunteers for it crossing to join it.

Rumsfeld's certainty about the wisdom of his policies has also been eroded by the departure or fading influence of several of the most powerful figures he appointed to shape and enforce them. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, dashed in his ambitions of succeeding Rumsfeld as defense secretary in President George W. Bush's second term, has already departed to run the World Bank.

Wolfowitz's right hand man, Douglas Feith, the most controversial under secretary for policy that the Department of Defense has ever had, is supposed to be standing down next month and Pentagon insiders say even Rumsfeld has finally tired of him.

However, Rumsfeld retains Harold Rhode as his adviser on Islamic affairs and Pentagon sources say Rhode is now urging a tough line towards both Iran and Syria - something neo-conservative commentators have started to call for anew in recent weeks.

In the past, Rumsfeld married his conviction that low ground force levels in Iraq could administer the country and defeat the insurgency to his passionate belief that the future of the U.S. military lay in pouring resources into high-tech, space based wonder weapons and super-sophisticated command and control systems, rather than boost the meat and potatoes infrastructure of the regular Army and Air Force.

He has given no sign that his passion for high tech fixes has diminished in anyway. But his new public frankness about the length of time it may take to win the war suggests that he may be coming around to the idea that greatly increased force levels may be required in Iraq.

And although Rumsfeld gives no hint of ever acknowledging the fact, he would then be tacitly admitting that former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, the man he hung out to dry two and half years ago for saying hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to take and hold the country, might be right after all.

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