At long last, the Iraq War appears to be over.

The US has been winding down its troop presence in Iraq for many months now, and will have reduced this to 50,000 by the end of August from a peak of 170,000 at the height of the ‘surge’ against the insurgency there in 2007. Under a 2008 agreement with the Iraqi government, those 50,000 are due to depart by the end of 2011. In the meantime, they will train and equip the Iraqi army. The US has already declared an end to combat operations, and Iraq has for some time now been referred to as the ‘forgotten war’ – a label given to Afghanistan in the mid-2000s before that country’s insurgency regained momentum.

Certainly, the relative absence of news from Iraq is good news. However, that doesn’t mean that all is OK there. Terror attacks continue to take place, even after top al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq were killed earlier this year. In addition, Iraq has yet to form a functioning government after the March 7 elections resulted in a deadlock. Furthermore, there is a real risk that sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shi’as, or conflict between Iraqi Kurds and Arabs could flare up again once the US is fully out of the picture.

In view of all this, two public comments by prominent Iraqi officials (past and present) are noteworthy. Iraqi army chief of staff Lt-Gen Babakar Zebari stated last week that the country’s armed forces are not ready to ensure security, and that the US military ought to stay until at least 2020. A few days earlier, Saddam Hussein’s former deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz also criticised the American withdrawal, saying that Iraq was being ‘left to the wolves’.

The best that the US and Iraq can hope for is that violence will dissipate between now and the end of 2011, allowing America to complete its withdrawal as scheduled, and leave a peaceful country behind. Once the US is out, the insurgency will also lose any remaining perceived legitimacy, for the perpetrators will only be able to be seen as terrorists – as opposed to anti-occupation resistance fighters. However, in view of Iraq’s internal weaknesses, I suspect that the current timetable is optimistic.

Indeed, there are two other scenarios to consider. Firstly, the US could fully withdraw in 2011, only for violence to surge in 2012, as General Zebari fears. By that point, it would be politically difficult to redeploy US troops in Iraq, especially in an election year. If Iraq descends into chaos, the US would look bad, especially since the chances are that the Afghan war will still be going strong.

This leads us to what I feel is the most likely scenario: During 2011, violence rises again, prompting the Iraqi and US governments to conclude that a substantial residual US military presence – though perhaps not as many as 50,000 – is still necessary. The scene would thus be set for an extended presence lasting many more years. For how long is difficult to say. General Zebari said 10 years, but the case of South Korea – where the US still has 28,500 troops fifty-seven years after the end of the Korean War – suggests a considerably longer period.