"In the life of a free people," the president said on Thursday night, "there come moments that decide the direction of a country and reveal the character of its people. We are now at such a moment."

Yes indeed.

And at this moment, we're staying in Iraq. We'll withdraw some troops in December, but only to the level they were before the Bush Surge. This is no drawdown at all.

When the president announced the Surge, he portrayed it as a new course, designed to reduce the violence, especially in Baghdad. It would give the Iraqi government "breathing space." It would buy the government time to make progress in "other critical areas": national reconciliation. The sharing of oil revenues. That hasn't happened, but we're ending the Surge anyway.

And while the drawdown sounds like a deliberate step forward, it is not. We'll bring those troops home because we can't sustain that level of deployment in Iraq. This is how thin the military is stretched.

General Petraeus, like the president, insists that we're making progress, that "a premature drawdown of our forces would likely have devastating consequences."

But the reality is this: "Iraq's problems will require a long-term effort," in Petraeus's words.

Petraeus and others are now saying openly that we may have to keep some troops in Iraq for nine or 10 years.

Nine or 10 years.

Are we willing to stay the course for that long? Lose lives for that long? Over nine or 10 years, can we keep our military strength at the level it needs to be - not only to "secure Iraq" but to deal with the myriad other threats in the world?

Can we do that without a draft?

Can we protect Iraq for the next nine or 10 years without robbing ourselves of money for schools, for health care, for job training, for housing?

General Petraeus has been accused of deceiving us, but shortly into his statement, he spelled out what's really happening in Iraq: "the nature of the conflict," as he put it.

"The fundamental source of the conflict," he said, "is competition among ethnic and sectarian communities for power and resources." Ethnic and sectarian conflict, not Al Qaeda - although Petraeus mentioned Al Qaeda 22 times in his address.

"The present course is hard," Ambassador Ryan Crocker said in his own testimony before Congress. "The alternatives are far worse."

Are they?

This, as the president said, is a moment to decide the direction of this country and reveal the character of its people.

I can not get out of my mind the words of a 24-year-old Baghdad dentist named Hassan Khalidy, who broke my heart every day last week on NPR's Morning Edition, describing what life has been like for him in Iraq. In an audio diary he recorded for NPR, Khalidy talked about his internet correspondence with people around the world, the deteriorating conditions in Baghdad, his parents' plea that he leave the country.

"So sorry," he would sometimes say gently."So sorry."

On Friday, NPR aired the last segment of Khalidy's diary, recorded over several weeks: the story of his best friend, kidnapped. "I pray to the God," he said one night, to lessen the torture his friend must be suffering. Days later, he resumed his diary: the kidnappers had set a ransom; the money had been raised, and his friend would be released the next day. And then, later still, Khalidy's sobbing description of the outcome: the friend's family went to the market and handed over the ransom, and the friend's decapitated body was dumped on the street.

Khalidy, NPR related, fled to Jordan, as his parents had urged. Jordan sent him back to Baghdad. And he is now in hiding.

We have done this. Saddam Hussein created his own horrors. But we are responsible for what Iraqis are suffering right now.

So sorry. So sorry.