A Tale of Two Wars: Iraq

A Tale Of Two Wars

Whoever wins on Nov. 4 will, inevitably, be a wartime President. In the streets of Iraq and in foxholes in Afghanistan, U.S. troops continue to fight a two-front engagement on perilous terrain, against a constantly shifting array of adversaries. John McCain supported the war in Iraq and was a leading advocate of the surge there; Barack Obama opposed the intervention and calls for pulling out roughly half of all U.S. troops by the middle of 2010. But whether that happens will depend largely on the performance of the Iraqi government. And the possibilities for a reduction in U.S. troops in Iraq must be balanced against the likely need to send more to Afghanistan, where the situation now looks somewhere between difficult and dire. Here are two on-the-ground assessments of the wars that await the next President:

Perhaps no place better symbolizes the stranger-than-fiction quality of the U.S. project in Iraq than the Republican Palace. The sprawling sandstone complex on the Tigris River was a monument to Saddam Hussein's regime. Then in 2003 it became the center of American power there--first of direct military rule, and following that, as headquarters of the U.S. embassy. Though U.S. officials removed some of the more egregious reminders of Saddam--like massive stone carvings of the dictator's head--the palace's marble floors and soaring ballrooms still make an incongruously imperial backdrop for the civilians and soldiers working to bring democracy to Iraq.

But the imperial phase of America's involvement in Iraq is ending. Probably by the end of the year, the U.S. will return the palace to the Iraqi government, and embassy staff will move into a new complex just down the river. The U.S. will still have a heavy footprint in Iraq--the embassy is the largest in the world and cost about $750 million to build. But the departure from the Republican Palace is part of a larger transfer of authority. So far, the U.S.-led coalition has turned over security responsibilities to Iraqi forces in 13 out of 18 provinces. And the Bush Administration is trying to seal a deal with the Iraqi government that, Washington hopes, would enable the U.S. to pull America's 152,000 troops out of Iraq's cities and towns by July of next year and out of the country entirely by 2012.

This transfer of responsibility would be unimaginable had it not been for the success of the surge of U.S. troops in Iraq, the deployment of U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces and the uprising of armed Iraqi civilian groups--the so-called Awakening--against jihadist insurgents and sectarian militias. Violence in Baghdad is down 90% from its height in 2006 and down 80% in the country as a whole, according to Rear Admiral Patrick Driscoll, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. "In 2006, Iraq was a failed state, and in 2008 Iraq is a fragile state," he says. But the surge is now over. Most of the extra 30,000 American soldiers have gone home, and another 8,000 will leave by the end of January.