An End-Date in Sight for the Endless War in Iraq

As President Barack Obama announced on Friday that the last of 39,000 U.S. troops deployed to Iraq would be home for the holidays, a lot of names came flooding back.

Fallujah. Ramadi. Triangle of Death. Neo-con. Anbar Province. IED. VBIED. WMDs. Firdos Square. Shock and awe. Abu Ghraib. Paul Bremer. Blackwater. Coalition Provisional Authority. Mosul. Ahmad Chalabi. Halliburton. Hillbilly armor. Shaped charges. Yellowcake. Spider hole.

This Iraq trivia test could go on, like the war did, for nearly nine years, but what would it prove? Indeed, what did the war prove?

That a powerful military force can, fairly quickly, depose the leader of a smaller sovereign nation. (For further reference, see "A" for Afghanistan and "L" for Libya.) But it's far more difficult to bring order to a diverse collection of tribes, ethnic groups and religious sects that were crudely combined into a nation.

That in counterinsurgency warfare, indigenous forces with short supply lines have a huge advantage (see "V" for Vietnam). That a people driven by a sectarian split that began in the seventh century will violently resist outside efforts to impose solutions.

Much of this should have been known going in, but there were forces inside George W. Bush's administration who were convinced of the righteous need to spread democracy by whatever means necessary.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who had spent decades arguing for a leaner, more agile military, felt validated when considering how quickly U.S. Special Forces, in league with tribesmen from Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, had overthrown the Taliban government.

So, on March 20, 2003, U.S.

forces went in light, three Army divisions and the First Marine Expeditionary Force, behind heavy bombing and missile strikes, moving rapidly north from Kuwait to Baghdad and beyond. Three weeks later, on April 9, the statue of Saddam Hussein fell in Firdos Square.

But well before that, as the 101st Airborne Division was fighting outside Najaf and Nasiriya, its commander, a relatively unknown two-star general named David Petraeus, was saying to his staff — and reporter Rick Atkinson of The Washington Post — "Tell me how this ends."

Eight years and seven months later, we have the answer: A guy who was in the Illinois state senate at the time would make a deal with an Arabic literature scholar who then was living in Syria. Obama was willing to leave a few thousand troops in Iraq past the end of the year, but Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said he couldn't get his parliament to give U.S. troops immunity from prosecution for any violation of Iraqi law.

Will Iraq hold together after the last U.S. boot leaves the ground? Its security forces are all trained-up, but the Sunni/Shia and secular-Shia/religious-Shia splits remain volatile. Sectarian war is less likely than it was five years ago, but one violent confrontation could change that. The Kurdish north remains restive. To the east lies Iran, a most intrusive neighbor.

The United States could stay for another generation and not fix any of that.

We got into these conflicts with the best of intentions but with too little thought. These wars cost too many lives, too much money and benefited too few people and too few interests. Whether they left the world any more secure is an open question.

It would be nice to think we won't make this kind of mistake again. We won't count on it.

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