WASHINGTON — Two years after the Iraq invasion began on March 19, 2003, more than 1,500 U.S. service members have died and more than 11,500 have been wounded.

About 138,000 U.S. troops are still in the country.

Analysts say thousands will be needed for years to prop up Iraq's budding democratic government against a virulent insurgency. Thousands of U.S. troops remain in Germany and South Korea decades after wars there ended, they note.

"This is probably a decadelong process," judged Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former Army Ranger.

Others are more optimistic.

The "natural life span" of most insurgencies is eight to 15 years, said Steven Metz, a counterinsurgency expert at the U.S. Army War College. But "I would fully expect within two years for the U.S. [troops] to be almost exclusively in an advisory role."

If opinions vary on when the troops might be withdrawn, most analysts agree that the answer depends on how long it takes to do three things:

• Establish a new government.

• Resuscitate the economy.

• Train sufficient Iraqi security forces to replace U.S. troops.

The insurgents — former Baathist regime members, foreign Islamic extremists such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and native Islamic extremists — are doing their best to disrupt all three projects.

Here's a look at where things stand on the war's second anniversary:

A new government

"We're making progress in helping Iraq develop a democracy," President Bush said in January. Four days later, millions of Iraqis braved insurgent threats and went to the polls to elect a national assembly.

The 275-member Transitional National Assembly convened for the first time in Baghdad on Wednesday. In coming weeks it is to elect a speaker, a prime minister and a three-member presidency council. By Aug. 15 it is to write a constitution, then submit it to a popular referendum by October.

"They're never going to do that," predicted Juan Cole, a Middle East expert at the University of Michigan. "That just seems to me to be a completely unrealistic timeline."

Seven weeks after the elections, Cole noted, the major winners — Shiite Arabs with 140 seats and Kurds with 75 — have yet to agree on forming a government.

As the assembly convened, the factions had reached only a tentative deal, under which Shiite leader Ibrahim al-Jaafari would become prime minister and head of the government while Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani would be president.

Sunnis are estimated to be 20 percent of the population but got fewer than 20 seats in the new assembly because most either boycotted the elections or stayed away for fear of violence.

Cole said the constitution-writing effort could break down on several issues, such as whether Iraq will be governed by civil or religious law, how to divide the country's oil revenues among the ethnic groups or how to balance regional and ethnic interests.

"They're burning issues over which people would fight," he said. "The process is going to be much more drawn-out than an Aug. 15 deadline would indicate."

James Placke, a Mideast expert with Cambridge Energy Research Associates who served as a foreign-service officer in Iraq years ago, acknowledged the difficult issues but said it was "reasonably hopeful" Iraq's new leaders would find ways to compromise.

"What's the alternative?" Placke reasoned.

Reviving the economy

Iraq's economy — distorted by 30 years of dictatorship, three wars and 10 years of U.N. economic sanctions — remains devastated and little progress has been made in rebuilding it.

Congress voted $18.4 billion for reconstruction in November 2003, but 16 months later, less than $4 billion has been spent.

"The insurgency makes it very difficult to accomplish much," noted Placke, an economist.

U.S. and Iraqi authorities had hoped the country's electric grid would be producing 6,000 megawatts daily by last July 1. So far in March, the level was 3,608 megawatts — down from a high of 4,707 last August, according to the center-left Brookings Institution's Iraq Index.

Insurgents' sabotage of the electric grid, Placke said, not only disrupts electricity for average Iraqis but also tends to shut down oil-pumping stations when the bombs are strategically placed.

U.S. reconstruction officials said at the Pentagon recently that while they have begun hundreds of projects since the Jan. 30 elections, much of the money has gone for security — fences, guards, armored cars and the like.

Meanwhile, inflation is raging at 31 percent and unemployment is somewhere between 28 and 40 percent, according to Brookings.

Iraqi security forces

Anthony Cordesman of the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies said in testimony to a House subcommittee last week that the job of establishing new security forces got off to a slow start because of the "failure" of U.S. officials to anticipate the insurgency.

And in a February report on Iraq's security forces, Cordesman wrote that they had been hampered by low morale, infiltration and intimidation by insurgents, cowardice and inexperienced leadership.

But he added that much progress has been made since last summer, when the task of training and equipping most of Iraq's forces was assigned to Lt. Gen. David Petraeus.

The current goal is 135,000 police and another 135,000 soldiers and other forces by June 2006. As of March 7, the Department of State reported, 142,472 Iraqis had been trained and equipped, including 55,015 police officers and 59,880 soldiers.

Last year, some Iraqi units refused to go on dangerous operations or deserted their posts when attacked by insurgents. But Petraeus proudly reported that on election day, "Some 5,200 polling sites were secured by two rings of Iraqi security personnel, estimated to number 130,000."

Gen. John Abizaid, commander of all U.S. troops in the Middle East, said that election-day performance gave "a glimpse of how good they can be. They will get better. And I think in 2005 they'll take on the majority of the tasks necessary to be done.

"What we really need to judge our success upon is whether or not Iraqi security forces go into an area and on their own start to defeat the insurgents," he added. "Where that starts to happen, place by place, step by step, that's when we'll win the insurgency.

"And it'll take a long time."