From The Washington Post
By Jackson Diehl

For five years Washington-based officials and pundits have repeatedly made the mistake of predicting that the next six or 12 months in Iraq would be decisive. Under the hardheaded leadership of Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker such talk has been banned: “Nobody says anything about turning a corner, seeing lights at the end of tunnels, any of those phrases,” Petraeus recently declared.

Yet, for once, saying that the next six to 12 months will win or lose the war just might be right.

That’s not because Iraqis have suddenly developed the capacity to meet the unrealistic timelines drawn up in Washington ever since 2003 — when the Pentagon planned to reduce U.S. troops to a skeleton force of 30,000 within six months of the capture of Baghdad. On the contrary, Petraeus and Crocker have spent the past year attempting to drive home the point that the U.S. goal of a stable, democratizing Iraq, if it can be achieved at all, will require an American commitment well beyond any of the timetables discussed in Washington — despite the remarkable success of this year’s military surge.

So the next six to 12 months are not crucial because of what will happen in Iraq — where, at best, violence will continue to decline incrementally, while Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds make painful and partial progress toward political settlements. The test will come in the United States — where first the Pentagon and the White House, and then the country, will decide whether to invest enough resources in Iraq to keep the hope of eventual success alive.

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