WEST POINT, N.Y. — A father in the American heartland agonizes as his son prepares for a second tour in Iraq. Baghdad morgue workers wash bodies for burial after a suicide attack. Army cadets study the shifting tactics of Iraqi insurgents for a battle they will inherit.
Snapshots from a war at its fifth year. Each distinct, each a narrative in itself — gnawing fear, raw violence, youthful resolve. Yet all linked by a single question.
How much longer?
Most likely, the war will go on for years, say many commanders and military analysts. In fact, it’s possible to consider this just the midpoint. The U.S. combat role in Iraq could have another half decade ahead — or maybe more, depending on the resilience of the insurgency and the political will in the U.S. to maintain the fight.
Iraq, experts say, is no longer a young war. Nor it is entering an endgame. It may still be in sturdy middle age.
“Four years, optimistically” before the Pentagon can begin a significant troop withdrawal from Iraq, predicted Eric Rosenbach, executive director of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School, “and more like seven or eight years” until Iraqi forces can handle the bulk of their own security.
What that means depends largely on your vantage point.
For the Pentagon, it’s about trying to build up a credible Iraqi security force while struggling to support its own troop levels in a military strained by nonstop warfare since 2001.
For many Americans, it’s about a rising toll — nearly 4,000 U.S. military deaths and more than 60,000 wounded — with no end in sight. Iraqis count their dead and injured in much higher figures — hundreds of thousands at least.
For others, it’s about an ever-mounting loss of goodwill overseas.
You can also frame the war in terms of the cost to the treasury: $12 billion a month by some estimates, $500 billion all together, and the prospect of hundreds of billions more.
But then there’s other measures of the war as it enters its sixth year.
These are more difficult to weigh — yet are just as real and profound — and are found in places such as Jim Durham’s home in Evansville, Ind. He tries to fight off a sense of dread as he watches his 29-year-old son prepare for his second tour in Iraq with the Indiana National Guard.
Durham, 59, struggled to describe his emotions. He decided: “It’s like watching somebody with a disease.”
“Perhaps they can live, perhaps they can’t,” he said. “Maybe they’ll survive. Maybe they won’t. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Echoes of the same lament resounded at a Shiite funeral procession in Baghdad where mourners gathered their dead from the morgue — the bodies washed for burial according to Muslim custom — after bombings ravaged two pet markets last month. “We are helpless. Only God can help us,” cried a group of women behind the shrouded corpses of several children.
“How much can Iraq endure? How much stamina do Americans have for a war with no end in sight?” said Ehsan Ahrari, a professor of international security at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. “These questions were relevant years ago. They only grow more critical as the years go by.”
Some remain determined. Ahrari recalls seeing a couple at the airport in Gulfport, Miss., saying goodbye to their son, clad in desert camouflage and heading for Iraq. He can’t forget the mother’s face: grim but stoic.
“She did not seem sure that her son was going to the right place to serve America,” he wrote, “but that it was still a right thing to do.”
But then there was the group of women on a bridge in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., holding “No to War” placards and being alternately cheered and jeered.
And Vietnam veteran Wilbur Taylor breaking down in tears at a VFW post in Evansville, Ind., as he thinks of the young soldiers in Iraq. “It’s an endless battle,” sobbed Taylor, 59.
He’s not far wrong.
Already, the war has lasted longer than the U.S. fight in World War II and Korea. And if many experts are to be believed, the Iraq war will follow roughly a 10-year arc, ending only after a new crop of soldiers is on the battlefield.
Certainly, the Democratic presidential candidates have called for a rapid and comprehensive withdrawal from Iraq.
But there are many doubts that Iraqi forces will be ready to take over so soon. “Can Iraq actually hold this together as we disappear?” a skeptical retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey asked last week in an address in New York to mark the war’s five-year anniversary.
The idea that the Iraq war has only reached its midpoint is based on historical templates. Many military strategists cite a nine- to 10-year average for insurgencies.
But the models also show that each fight is unique. Kurdish rebels have been fighting in Turkey for more than 20 years, and the FARC guerrillas have been active in Colombia since the 1960s.
The fragmented nature of the Iraq fighting also may add years to U.S. involvement. The different tactics needed for various regions create difficulties in training Iraqi forces and making decisive strikes against insurgents such as al-Qaida in Iraq.
The insurgency, however, may not be the most worrisome problem in coming years. Some believe the worst struggle will be keeping friction between Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites from ballooning into civil war.
By the time the summer’s political conventions are held, U.S. troop strength is expected to shrink with the pullout of many of the 30,000 “surge” forces. The Pentagon predicts troop levels will be at 140,000 soldiers by July, though that’s still 8,000 more than the total before the surge.
The war’s length depends, too, on whether the Iraqis and their government can hold on. To a far lesser extent, it also hinges on world sentiment — the U.N. Security Council mandate for the U.S.-led force in Iraq is set to expire at the end of the year, which could increase international pressure for withdrawal.
But more than anything else, it depends on whether Americans are willing.
Mary Shuldt is losing patience. Living at Fort Campbell in the Kentucky lowlands, she wonders how many more times her husband and the 101st Airborne Division will be called to Iraq.
“Our families are being ripped apart,” she said. “When is enough enough?”
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