How will the war end? Answers remain elusive

WASHINGTON -- A week after U.S. troops invaded Iraq, as sandstorms and attacks by fanatical paramilitaries threatened supply lines and inflicted casualties, the commander of the 101st Airborne Division betrayed misgivings.

"Tell me how this ends," Maj. Gen. David Petraeus challenged a Washington Post reporter embedded with his unit.

Two years after the conflict began on March 19, 2003, no one yet knows the answer.

More than 1,500 U.S. service members have died and more than 11,500 have been wounded since the war began.

Nearly 150,000 U.S. troops are still in the country.

Analysts say thousands will be needed for years to come to prop up its 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 decade-long process," judged Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former Army Ranger.

He added: "Because we have taken it upon ourselves not simply to defeat a conventional force -- that was done quickly -- but the president has staked out a mission which is to transform the culture, the politics, the economics of Iraq.

"That's not going to happen overnight."

Others are more optimistic.

The "natural lifespan" of most insurgencies is roughly 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," he said.

President Bush and other key officials avoid such forecasts.

"Our troops will come home when Iraq is capable of defending herself," the president told a news conference this week. "We need to complete the mission."

If opinions vary on when the troops might be withdrawn, most analysts agree that the answer depends on how long it takes to do three things: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

Consequently, beating down the insurgency is necessary to achieving U.S. goals in Iraq, analysts agree. Conversely, making progress toward those goals is key to deflating the insurgency.

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," Bush said in January. Four days later, millions of Iraqis braved insurgent threats and went to the polls to elect a national assembly. Joyously, defiantly, many waved ink-stained fingers in the air to show that they'd voted.

A poll conducted between Feb. 7 and March 5 found that 61.5 percent of 2,200 Iraqis surveyed in 15 of the country's 18 provinces felt their country was "headed in the right direction," reports the International Republican Institute (www.iri.org/03-15-05- IraqPoll.asp).

Bush and others have been celebrating the Iraqis' enthusiasm for democracy ever since the election. But much remains to be done to reach the goal of a firmly rooted democratic government.

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.

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. "It's certainly not going to be easy. Impossible? No, I don't think so."

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.

"The insurgency as part of its tactics is aiming at disrupting the economy. They blow up powerlines and so forth."

U.S. and Iraqi authorities had hoped the country's election 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 Brookings Institution's Iraq Index.

Sabotaging the electric grid, Placke added, 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 new 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 the nonpartisan Brookings Institution.

Oil production was 2.1 million barrels a day in February, still shy of the 2.5 million barrels-a-day goal, and February oil revenues slipped to $1.34 billion from $1.49 billion in January, Brookings reports on its Iraq Index (www.brookings.edu/iraqindex).

Gen. John Abizaid, commander of all U.S. troops in the Middle East, told the Senate Armed Services Committee recently that "one of the most important things we can do in Iraq is get the angry young men off the streets, and that (means) put them to work."

Building security forces

Anthony Cordesman of the 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 now Lt. Gen. Petraeus, who won his third star after spending a year in Iraq leading the 101st Airborne.

"It is far too soon to claim success, or any kind of tipping point in the development of Iraqi forces," Cordesman said, but Iraqi officers and officials think their forces "should be able to secure much of the country by 2006." 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 that 142,472 Iraqis had been trained and equipped, including 55,015 police officers and 59,880 soldiers.

When Abizaid testified to the Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., pressed him on whether such numbers overstate how well things are going.

Abizaid replied that "the big question doesn't really have to do with numbers" but with the capability of the Iraqi forces, which he said was improving.

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.

"It was Iraqi police and soldiers who gave their lives to prevent several suicide vest bombers from blowing up large numbers of those standing in line to vote," he added.

Abizaid 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."

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