Thomas Ricks says, "The events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably haven't even happened yet"

"I don't think the Iraq war is over, and I worry that there is more to come than any of us suspect."

-- Washington Post military correspondent Thomas Ricks, in a piece in yesterday's paper adapted from his new book

by Ken

Thomas Ricks is one of the journalists who didn't screw up in his coverage of the Iraq war. I'm guessing that his last book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, was one of the less popular books among the people who planned and ran that war in the Bush-Cheney White House and Pentagon. I believe it was Jon Stewart he told -- on the tour for his new book, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 -- that Fiasco got him access to people who probably wouldn't have talked to him before.

Which is all by way of saying that when Thomas Ricks talks about Iraq, I'm inclined to listen. I'd rather not. One of the saving graces of the economic meltdown, after all, has been that it stopped us from having to think about Iraq.

Or did it?

"It struck me that the more we talk about getting out of the Middle East," Ricks writes, "the more deeply we seem to become engaged in it."

President Obama campaigned on withdrawing from Iraq, but even he has talked about a post-occupation force. The widespread expectation inside the U.S. military is that we will have tens of thousands of troops there for years to come. Indeed, in his last interview with me last November, Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told me that he would like to see about 30,000 troops still there in 2014 or 2015.

Yet many Americans seem to think that the war, or at least our part in it, is close to being wrapped up. When I hear that, I worry. I think of a phrase that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz often used in the winter of 2003, before the invasion: "Hard to imagine." It was hard to imagine, he would tell members of Congress, the media and other skeptics, that the war would last as long as they feared, or that it could cost as much as all that, or that it might require so many troops. I worry now that we are once again failing to imagine what we have gotten ourselves into and how much more we will have to pay in blood, treasure, prestige and credibility.

I don't think the Iraq war is over, and I worry that there is more to come than any of us suspect.

A smaller but long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq is probably the best we can hope for. The thought of having small numbers of U.S. troops dying for years to come in the country's deserts and palm groves isn't appealing, but it appears to be better than either being ejected or pulling out -- and letting the genocidal chips fall where they may.

Almost every American official I interviewed in Iraq over the past three years agreed. "This is not a campaign that can be won in one or two years," said Col. Peter Mansoor, who was Gen. David H. Petraeus's executive officer during much of the latter's tour in Iraq. "The United States has got to be willing to underwrite this effort for many, many years to come. I can't put it in any brighter colors than that."

Of course the question hanging over us is, what happens when we leave?

Many worried that as the United States withdraws and its influence wanes, the Iraqi tendency toward violent solutions will increase. In September 2008, John McCreary, a veteran analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, predicted that the arrangement imposed by the U.S. government on Iraqi factions should worry us for several reasons. First, it produces what looks like peace -- but isn't. Second, one of the factions in such situations will invariably seek to break out of the arrangement. "Power sharing is always a prelude to violence," usually after the force imposing it withdraws, he maintained.

Many of those closest to the situation in Iraq expect a full-blown civil war to break out there in the coming years. "I don't think the Iraqi civil war has been fought yet," one colonel told me. Others were concerned that Iraq was drifting toward a military takeover. Counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen worried that the classic conditions for a military coup were developing -- a venal political elite divorced from the population lives inside the Green Zone, while the Iraqi military outside the zone's walls grows both more capable and closer to the people, working with them and trying to address their concerns.

In addition, the American embrace of former insurgents has created many new local power centers in Iraq, but many of the faces of those who run them remain obscure. "We've made a lot of deals with shady guys," Col. Michael Galloucis, the Military Police commander in Baghdad, said in 2007, at the end of his tour. "It's working. But the key is, is it sustainable?"

Ricks goes on to discuss the likely crucial but unpredictable role to be played by the infamous Moqtada al-Sadr. ("If he can stay alive, more power is likely to flow to him." But, says "Oxford-educated expert on Iraqi Shiites" Reidar Visser, "It should not be forgotten that the Sadrists are Tehran's historical main enemy among the Shiites of Iraq.") And the complex role of Iran. And the readiness and disposition of Iraq's own military -- and the frequent pessimism expressed by former American ground troops, and by Iraqi commanders he has spoken to, as against the more hopeful view expressed by American generals like Raymond Odierno. ("He believes that Iraqi commanders have improved and that they will no longer automatically revert to Saddam-era viciousness.")

So, to address the perceptive question that [Gen. David] Petraeus posed during the invasion: How does this end?

Probably the best answer came from Charlie Miller, who did the first draft of policy development and presidential reporting for Petraeus. "I don't think it does end," he replied. "There will be some U.S. presence, and some relationship with the Iraqis, for decades. . . . We're thinking in terms of Reconstruction after the Civil War."

The quiet consensus emerging among many who have served in Iraq is that U.S. soldiers will probably be engaged in combat there until at least 2015 -- which would put us at about the midpoint of the conflict now.

"What the world ultimately thinks about us and what we think about ourselves," U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said to me last year, "is going to be determined much more by what happens from now on than what's happened up to now."

In other words, the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably haven't even happened yet.

Now there's a cheery thought.

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