THE LONGTERM PLAN

As the United States military draws up long-term plans to leave Iraq, top officers are looking to the U.S. intervention in Bosnia's civil war as a model for an American exit strategy here.

The United States will keep combat teams in Iraq for the next few years, pulling them gradually out of cities into the countryside, and then perhaps into Kuwait and other countries. Eventually it will leave entirely, said Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack, commander of the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division.