Mike Tharp: Endstate in Iraq -- two answers

Endstate.

That's the U.S. military's strategic term to describe their "commander's intent" --their goal -- before they leave Iraq in 2011.

For most Americans, the fancy word will help answer two key questions:

1) Did we win or lose?

2) Was it worth it?

Three tours in Iraq -- six weeks this year, six weeks last year, 100 hours in 1991 with "visa" provided by the sappers of Fort Bragg's 37th Engineer Battalion -- don't make an expert.

But there are several reasons to try to answer, even with limited expertise, those questions. Five reasons are the names inscribed in granite at Courthouse Park, the Mercedians who died in Iraq.

Other reasons include the vets who came back whole, more or less, to live and work among us. They returned home with scars and wounds, mostly inside, that they never talk about but carry with them every day.

The Twitter Generation, the Thumb Tribe -- kids today in high school and below -- need answers because they'll be the next to go to the next war.

Finally, there's you -- Mercedians who are paying for this war and the one in Afghanistan. Paying money most of you can't afford. Money that could be spent well here. You'll pay it if you believe it has been spent to make you safer.

To answer the two questions, we need to look at Iraq now and over the next 28 months. At the end of 2011, U.S. troops must leave Iraq, under terms of last year's Status of Forces Agreement, unless the government of Iraq asks them to stay.

One important measuring stick, especially if you live in Iraq, is the level of violence. It's been falling for almost two years. Each week, 60 to 80 Iraqis are killed and a couple hundred wounded, but U.S. KIA/WIA have dropped to their lowest point since the 2003 U.S. invasion. (In June more Iraqi civilians were killed than in any month over the past year.)

The drop-off in dead and maimed has continued after the historic pullback of U.S. combat forces from major Iraqi cities on June 30. That bodes well for Iraqis and Americans alike, if it can be sustained. The violence metric -- another military term of art -- suggests that the insurgency which brought Iraq to the brink of civil war in 2006-2007 is losing.

But only if you look at the insurgents as a monolith, as were the Viet Cong. They are not. They are tribes still fighting centuries-old blood feuds.

They are Shia, who see their chance to run a country surrounded by Sunni-led regimes (except Iran).

They are Sunni, outsiders now after dominating Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

And they are Kurds, the ancient Indo-European millions who live in a crescent encompassing Iraq, Iran and Turkey, and feel displaced wherever they are.

All of them have buried homemade bombs. All of them have forced their neighbors of a slightly different creed to leave their homes in the dark of night at the point of a gun. All of them have attacked and killed one another -- and Americans.

So is the insurgency losing? Parts of it are. Parts of it, such as al-Qaida in Iraq, are regrouping, biding their time, keeping their IEDs dry. They're waiting to see what the Iraqi security forces do. And what the Americans do, or don't do.

Shia gunmen are lying low. For them, things couldn't be better. They control the government, the security forces and the Americans are leaving.

For Sunnis, there's a lingering fear that as Americans withdraw, Shia groups like Jaysh al Mahdi will return to sectarian violence. The Kurds fear their loss of autonomy.

Most Sunnis believe faith-based slaughter won't happen again because so many Iraqis are just plain tired of violence. But they also worry they'll be discriminated against by the government and security forces when the Americans pull out.