U.S. may be just at midpoint in Iraq

WEST POINT, N.Y. — An American father 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 yet all linked by a single question: How much longer?

Most likely, the war will go on for years, many commanders and military analysts said. 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 theresilience of the insurgency and the U.S. political will to maintain the fight.

"Four years, optimistically" before the Pentagon can begin a significant troop withdrawal from Iraq, said 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 means 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 — and see neighborhoods changed by the millions who have fled for safer havens.

For others, it's about a mounting loss of goodwill overseas: "We've squandered our good name," said Ryan Meehan, 29, sitting in a St. Louis coffee shop.

"War fatigue is real"

The war can also be framed in terms of the cost to the U.S. Treasury: $12 billion a month by some estimates, $500 billion all together, and the prospect of hundreds of billions more.

There are other measures of the war on its fifth anniversary, which is March 19 in the United States and March 20 in Iraq.

These are more difficult to weigh and are found in places such as Jim Durham's home in Evansville, Ind. He tries to fight 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 the emotions. He decided: "It's like watching somebody with a disease. Perhaps they can live, perhaps they can'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."

Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign-policy scholar at the Brookings Institution, said, "War fatigue is real, first and foremost because of casualties. But Americans also know the stakes."

Some people remain determined. Ahrari recalled seeing a couple at the Gulfport, Miss., airport 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, but that it was still a right thing to do," Ahrari said.

There was also a group of women on a bridge in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., holding "No to War" placards and being alternately cheered and jeered.

Fragmented fighting

The war has lasted longer than the U.S. fight in World War II and Korea. If many experts are to be believed, the Iraq war will follow roughly a 10-year arc, ending after a new crop of soldiers — some now barely into their teens — is on the battlefield.

The halfway scenario is based on historical templates. Many military strategists cite a nine- to 10-year average for insurgencies, with expected drop-offs in recruitment and core strength after a decade.

But the models — analyzing battles from the British in Malaysia in the 1950s to the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s — also show that each fight is unique. Kurdish rebels have been fighting in Turkey more than 20 years, and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, guerrillas have been active in Colombia since the 1960s.

The fragmented nature of the Iraq fighting — what has been called a "mosaic war" — 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.

At West Point, professor Brian Fishman is an expert in al-Qaida. He tells his cadets that the Iraq war is fundamentally "a collection of local wars" to preserve key local alliances with Iraqi groups and keep pressure on insurgents from regaining footholds.

"Iraq is a fight that, no doubt, is evolving," said Fishman after teaching his class for the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy. "But when you talk about some kind of end for American troops, it's certainly in terms of years."

His cadets were in high school when the war started, and they could be well into their military careers before it's over.

Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the former No. 2 commander in Iraq, said in January that U.S. aircraft could be used to support Iraqi combat operations for "five to 10 years" along with "an appropriate number of ground forces."

That same month, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, the former Fort Lewis commander who now heads the Multi-National Security Transition Command in Iraq, told the House Armed Services Committee that Iraqi officials estimate they can't assume responsibility for internal security until as late as 2012 and won't be able to defend Iraq's borders until 2018.

Internal violence

The insurgency, however, may not be the most worrisome problem in coming years. Some people think the worst struggle will be keeping friction between Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites from ballooning into civil war.

"I don't know anyone who pays serious attention to Iraq who thinks that we are over the hump in terms of internal violence," said Jon Alterman, the Middle East program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "There are a lot of unsettled scores and no ongoing political process that seems likely to address them."

If the Democrats win in November, these type of assessments will clash with their calls for a rapid and comprehensive withdrawal.

By that time, U.S. troop strength is expected to shrink with the pullout of many of the 30,000 forces that poured into central Iraq last year as part of President Bush's buildup. Pentagon officials expect to be at 140,000 soldiers by July, 8,000 more than the total before the buildup.

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has predicted the insurgency will "go on for years and years and years." But, eventually, the Iraqi forces will have to fight alone. It's the often-touted South Korean scenario: local forces someday on the front lines with a U.S. military presence in a supporting role, possibly for decades.

"A thousand years. A million years. Ten million years," McCain said in New Hampshire in January. "It depends on the arrangement we have with the Iraqi government."

It depends, too, on whether the Iraqis and their government can hold on. To a lesser extent, the war's length 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?"

Associated Press writers contributing to this report: Carley Petesch in New York, Chelsea Carter in San Diego, Ryan Lenz in Evansville, Ind., Betsy Taylor in St. Louis, Bradley Brooks in Baghdad.