In 2009, a New President and the Same War

WASHINGTON — Five years after President Bush launched the war in Iraq, the three major candidates seeking to replace him have proposed distinctly different visions of the future of the conflict.

But the complex realities of the costly and complex war and the strategic importance of the region will pose problems to all three visions, analysts say.

— Republican John McCain has said he would stay the course, maintaining a long-term U.S. troop presence with a robust combat mission aimed at routing terrorist and insurgent groups.

— Democrat Barack Obama has vowed to begin bringing Americans home from Iraq as soon as he takes office and to have most combat forces home within 16 months.

— Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton says she would begin reducing U.S. troop levels within 60 days of taking office, continuing to pace reductions according to conditions on the ground.

"To a certain extent all three positions are naive," said retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. "Reality is going to interject itself here."

No matter who replaces Bush, the next president will find options in Iraq limited.

"You can say anything you want during the campaign right now," said former Pentagon official Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. "The real world here doesn't have all that much to do with political campaigns or anniversaries. It has to do with the facts on the ground when the president takes office."

There are 154,000 U.S. forces currently in Iraq.

Future stability depends on further reducing bloodshed, easing sectarian tensions, achieving competent Iraqi governance and spurring economic development, said Cordesman, tasks likely to take at least another four years.

"The truth is that we are talking about really the life of the next presidency to make a clear transition to the point where the Iraqis can take over," he said. "That doesn't mean maintaining today's troops levels ... but helping Iraq achieve any kind of lasting stability and security is not going to be quick."

McCain has fully embraced that thinking. He has called Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, "one of the greatest generals in American history." He has endorsed even greater troop levels than the Bush administration has been willing to deploy to Iraq. And he has assailed pledges by Obama and Clinton to begin troop pull-outs by the calendar.

But many experts said that McCain's course will further strain U.S. military forces already struggling to maintain sufficient troop and equipment levels in the face of the longest war the United States has ever fought with an all-volunteer force.

"The forces would not 'break' but, as a fairness matter, it's going to be continually dependent on our soldiers and Marines," said Michael O'Hanlon, a senior foreign policy fellow with the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. "It's very hard on the men and women in uniform."

As those strains have mounted, Democratic presidential hopefuls have laid out their plans for ending the war.

Obama has said he would begin immediately as president bringing home one or two brigades a month — a brigade is roughly 3,500 troops — and have all combat units out within 16 months of taking office.

The plan has the support of many Americans, but the public is divided.

Four in 10 Americans favor staying the course, reasoning that the war was not a mistake and that U.S. forces can help build stability in Iraq if they stay there long enough, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll.

The same poll found 60 percent of Americans opposed to the war. Just 17 percent, however, said U.S. forces should get out now, while 20 percent said this country has an obligation to remain until some reasonable level of security can be established. The poll queried 2,021 adults nationwide Feb. 21-24 and has a 2 percentage point margin of error.

Clinton has tried to leave room for maneuvering in her policy, which calls for quickly beginning to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq, but to then assess conditions on the ground before ordering further cuts.

She and Obama have also called for more assertive regional diplomacy in the sensitive, oil-rich region.

"With Obama you have the near certainty of mission failure. With McCain you have serious strain on the forces. Clinton is close to Obama but with a little more flexibility," said O'Hanlon, a former Clinton adviser.

On March 19, 2003, Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office, telling the country, that polls showed was solidly behind the war at the time, that he had sent American troops into Iraq to rid it of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, "to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger."

White House aides said then that the war would cost the U.S. taxpayers perhaps $60 billion.

Six weeks later, Bush donned a flight suit, stood on an aircraft carrier draped with a banner reading "Mission Accomplished," and the president declared that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."

Five years on, the war has taken the lives of 3,975 American troops and wounded 29,395 others, according to Pentagon figures.

No stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction have been found.

Taxpayers have spent $607 billion to pay for the war through next September. The bipartisan congressional Joint Economic Committee estimates that the war will cost Americans between $3.5 trillion and $4.5 trillion by 2017, when long-term costs such as medical care for the wounded are taken into account.

Whoever replaces Bush will inherit a war that will be listing toward its seventh year when the next president is sworn in on Jan. 20, 2009.

"If we are to have a reasonable debate about this we have to talk about long-term consequences," Cordesman said. "At this point in time the American people tend to really be confronted not by real options but by a very artificial debate with artificial timelines, which, in many ways, is devoid of the real world consequences of making those policy choices."