By Andrew Gray

WASHINGTON, Feb 12 (Reuters) - When the next U.S. president is chosen, America may have about as many troops in Iraq as it did two years earlier, when voters tired of the war handed President George W. Bush's Republicans an election defeat.

That prospect appears more likely after Defense Secretary Robert Gates backed the idea of a pause in drawdowns after the current planned set of withdrawals ends this summer.

Bush ordered a surge of about 30,000 more troops to Iraq after his mid-term election loss in 2006, boosting the total to about 160,000. Under current plans, most -- but not all -- of those extra forces are due to have headed home by mid-July.

Gates had previously voiced the hope that drawdowns could proceed at the same pace in the second half of the year.

Analysts said his support for a pause showed top U.S. officials believed Iraq remained fragile despite substantial improvements in security last year.

"I think it reflects a good deal of uneasiness on the part of the Bush administration," said Ted Carpenter, vice president of the Cato Institute think tank.

Democrats attacked Gates' support for a pause, voiced on a visit to Baghdad on Monday, indicating that Iraq could return as a top issue on the election agenda.

The exact number of U.S. troops in Iraq late this year is hard to predict but could be around the 130,000 the United States had there before Bush ordered reinforcements.

The number of ground combat troops in the surge was around 21,500 and they are all scheduled to depart.

But Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, has not said if some 8,000 other troops who filled support roles will stay or be replaced when the combat troops go.

If a substantial number stay or are replaced, the U.S. force could be still well over 130,000 in the summer.

Should a pause then begin and last a month or two, troop levels could still be somewhere around the 130,000 mark as Americans pick Bush's successor on Nov. 4.

HOW BRIEF IS BRIEF?

Seeking to dampen speculation that there might be no further withdrawals after the summer for the rest of 2008, the Pentagon said on Tuesday that the pause may not last long.

"A pause could be very brief," spokesman Bryan Whitman said. "A brief pause for evaluation and consolidation does not mean that further reductions will not take place."

But he declined to define "brief" in terms of days, weeks or months.

At the very least, Gates' hope of getting down to 10 combat brigades in Iraq by the end of the year -- a level of roughly 100,000 troops depending on the number of support elements involved -- now looks hard to achieve.

Under current plans, there would be 15 ground combat brigades in Iraq in August. If the pause is anything more than a couple of weeks, brigades would have to withdraw at the rate of at least one a month -- faster than has been usual so far.

Any pause in drawdowns is likely to cause alarm in the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, who are worried about severe strain placed on U.S. ground forces by Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, has made clear he wants tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan cut from 15 months to 12 months as soon as possible -- a task that could be made more difficult by a decision to halt the drawdown.

But Petraeus has urged a caution with drawdowns, saying security gains could be put at risk if they are too hasty.

He told Reuters his recommendations on withdrawals would depend on conditions on the ground in different parts of Iraq.

"We have a whole list of factors, security, political and local political factors -- you are not looking at Iraq as a whole and seeing if you can do with one less brigade," he said in an interview in Baghdad on Monday.

"You are looking at an area and saying 'well, if we pull that brigade out, you might have to replace it with a battalion from another' and that thins another area," he said. (Additional reporting by Kristin Roberts in Washington and Sean Maguire and Dean Yates in Baghdad) (Editing by Xavier Briand)

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