Senator Clinton offered the most detailed account yet of her strategy for ending America’s involvement in the Iraq conflict yesterday, telling Iowa residents that she will order her Joint Chiefs of Staff, defense secretary, and National Security Council to draft a plan to start withdrawing troops within the first 60 days of her administration if she is elected president.

The speech, delivered in Des Moines, seemed designed to align the New York senator further with the top Democratic presidential candidates on ending the war. And it was delivered while her leading rival, Senator Obama of Illinois, was also in Des Moines talking about Iraq.

The three-part plan is her most detailed outline to date on the deadlines and goals she would set if elected. It includes the creation of a group of neighboring states to stabilize the Iraq region and the appointment of a United Nations representative.

Political analysts say the announcement, which comes as Congress is starting another round of debate on the war, is a clear attempt to cement the idea that she is just as committed to ending the war as her Democratic rivals, despite the fact that she has been dogged in refusing to categorize her vote to authorize it as a “mistake.”

“The best case scenario is to fuzz up the difference on Iraq and have debates about other issues,” a political consultant who is not affiliated with any campaign, Daniel Gerstein, said.

Mr. Gerstein said Mrs. Clinton’s pledges were designed to get her on the same page as her opponents, not to differentiate her position.

“She doesn’t want to be varying on Iraq,” he said. “She wants to find the sweet spot where she can show the base she can be trusted to end the war in a way that is not going to make her look weak once the general election comes.”

For the last several months, Mrs. Clinton been trying to downplay the differences between her stance on Iraq and the positions that her two closest Democratic rivals, Mr. Obama and John Edwards, have taken. They have been doing just the opposite.

Yesterday, Mr. Obama, who opposed the war from the outset, seemed to take a swipe at Mrs. Clinton, saying that coming around to an anti-war position late was not good enough.

“Being a leader means that you’d better do what’s right and leave the politics aside because there are no do-overs on an issue as important as war,” the Associated Press quoted him as saying. He added that the Iraq war should never have been authorized.

Mr. Edwards, a former North Carolina senator who has apologized for his war vote, has called for a withdrawal of 40,000 to 50,000 troops.

The former first lady has never apologized or her vote. Instead, she has criticized President Bush for his handling of the conflict at every turn and has announced plans to introduce legislation to de-authorize the war. Yesterday during her speech she stressed that she voted against a bill to fund the war without “any plan for ending it.”

A senior fellow at Center for American Progress, Brian Katulis, said Mrs. Clinton’s plan sounds “like the same sort of menu that you are hearing from a lot of folks.”

“It makes sense to me in terms of a policy package,” he said. “I think what Senator Clinton is starting to do is to put a little more flesh on the bones,” he added. “I think it’s quite similar to what others are doing at this point.”

The chairman of the politics and international relations department at Drake University in Iowa, Arthur Sanders, said Mrs. Clinton knows that she is never going to win over the most entrenched anti-war Democrats, but he noted that she can still reach undecided voters who are against the war. Mr. Gerstein noted that Mrs. Clinton’s language has been the most presidential among the Democratic hopefuls, with regular references to “her administration” and “her Cabinet.” “It’s a drip, drip, drip effect,” he said. “It has a subtle but lasting effect on how people think of her.”