A major milestone passed last week with no real attendant fanfare. Indeed, it would be in the best interests of the Bush Administration if no one noticed at all.

I’m speaking of the length of time we have been engaged in the seemingly endless quagmire in Iraq.

As of Sunday, 26 November 2006, we have been engaged in the Iraq conflict longer than we were involved in World War II. On Sunday, the Iraq conflict, which officially began on 20 March 2003, had lasted 1,347 days; our official involvement in World War II, as measured from the date we declared war on Japan and Germany (8 December 1941) to V-J Day (15 August 1945) was 1,346 days.

Only three other conflicts – The Revolutionary War, The Civil War and Vietnam – lasted longer than the current Iraq debacle.

The Revolutionary War is, generally, considered to have officially begun on 19 April 1775, with the battles of Lexington and Concord, and ended with the Treaty of Paris, signed on 3 September 1783. Using these dates, our fight for independence took 3,059 days.

As every high school student should know, the Civil War began with the firing on Fort Sumter on 12 April 1861 and ended with Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on 9 April 1865, a period covering 1,459 days.

The beginning of the conflict in Vietnam is a bit more complicated to determine because there was never an official declaration of war. The U. S. had advisors in Vietnam as early as 1950 aiding the French. However, the most generally accepted date for the beginning of this war is December 11, 1961 when the U.S. aircraft carrier “Core” arrived in Saigon with 33 helicopters and 400 air and ground crewmen assigned to operate them for the South Vietnamese Army. The end of the Vietnam War came with the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops on 29 April 1975. Thus, Vietnam became our longest war, lasting a total of 4,887 days.

The question now is whether we will see Iraq surpass Vietnam in terms of length of engagement. Given the lack of “progress,” however one chooses to define it in the context of Iraq, and the unbending resolve of the Bush Administration to stay in Iraq “until the job is done,” whatever that means, it seems entirely conceivable the U.S. couldl be engaged in Iraq for another 3,541 days and, thus, surpass the length of the Vietnam conflict.

Granted, it will take over two Presidential terms past Bush’s last day in office for the Iraq mess to become our longest war, but we cannot readily dismiss the possibility that this might happen. It will be up to at least one President after Bush to right the error that is Iraq, and the longer we go without correcting the situation, the more difficult it will be to do so.

If we extrapolate the 2,883 American deaths that have occurred in Iraq through 27 November 2006, protracting our involvement in Iraq for almost another 10 years will result in approximately 7,500 more deaths suffered by our forces. This would bring the total number of Americans lost in Iraq to just over 10,000.

While the number of 10,000 does not come close to matching the 58,159 soldiers killed in Vietnam or the 407,300 killed in World War II, and does not even match the more than 10,000 killed in just three days at Gettysburg, 10,000 deaths is 10,000 too many in an ill-conceived, objectless, politically self-serving action. And, while one might scoff at the idea of the U.S. remaining in Iraq for another ten years, all we have to do is stop and think about how quickly the last 1,347 days have passed.

Then, too, there is the Vietnam experience as evidence of our capabiity for getting ourselves into a protracted conflict only to discover just how difficult it is to extricate ourselves.