Can the United States afford a hundred years war in the Middle East?

So, the long and winding road through Iraq to - what: victory? reduced combat deaths? political stabilization? economic normalcy? safer streets? is winding toward an end.

Or is it?

Democrats, in the home-front warfare of election campaigns, seem to want a quick finish, a fast withdrawal. All of them must surely know that's impossible. How do you withdraw 120,000 combat and support troops, their arms and installations and supply infrastructure, their Burger Kings and officers billets, in a matter of weeks, or months, or even years - all while dodging those IEDs, mortar rounds and bullets?

Republicans want some kind of continuing presence, a status-of-forces treaty to serve as "parameters for a long-term security relationship" (with or without hostilities, signed or unsigned by the Congress), as the Wall Street Journal puts it, and a lingering U.S. force for as long as it takes.

As long as what takes?

John McCain, possibly in a moment of off-handedness, has said that spending a hundred more years at this will be acceptable, as long as that will let the U.S. soldiers, again in the Journal's definition of the goal line, "Secure ... the conditions by which they can drive out al -Qaida and tame the Shiite militias, deter Syria and Iran, and guarantee Iraq's integrity and freedom ..."

Whoa! Is that really what we signed up for?

Would it be impolitic to recall, at this moment of choice, that just about every one of the problems that has turned Iraq into our quagmire has been the result of self-fulfilling American prophecies?

Hidden weapons of mass destruction? None. Mission accomplished? No. An alliance of Hussein with al-Qaida? Never happened. Roses and victory parades on Iraqi streets? There weren't any. Nose-to-nose conflict with Iran, which still threatens to erupt into a new war? Didn't see that coming, either.

About all that was foreseen was set out by General Eric Shinseki, before the invasion: It would take 200,000 or more troops from the outset to produce lasting victory. Washington didn't agree with that prediction either, and so it has taken the 'surge' of 30,000-plus soldiers to begin to produce motion toward a more secure set of sidewalks and streets in Baghdad.

The truth is not about when the surge began and will end, or what it might have produced. The truth is our military presence around and in Iraq already dates back 17 years, to the day Desert Storm broke.

The truth is, status-of-forces agreements and similar treaties and commitments have us still deployed in Japan and Germany (63 years), Korea (58 years) and various other old hot or warm spots, like Italy and Turkey, for periods ranging from a half a century to a decade and more.

No, we're not being shot at in those spots at the moment: but we could be. Is that the "status" we seek to achieve in Iraq?

If so these commitments, whichever past, present or future President decided to make them, will have horrendous costs. Not only does Iraq have an ongoing multi-hundred-billion-dollar price tag on it, but the demands of future American security overall are crushing us already, everywhere: President Bush's newly submitted budget plan calls for 70 percent more defense dollars - over half a trillion, plus open-ended draws for Iraq and Afghanistan - than we spent just in fiscal 2001.

Why? Because the nature of warfare and security needs we must prepare for now has fan-folded out to dozens of different missions for our active-duty, national guard and reserve forces, plus our paramilitary operations like the Coast Guard, the Border Patrol, CIA, Homeland Security, ATS, FBI.

Where will the money to make us Number One in rebuilding our forces, in star wars, in anti-terrorism, in cyber-defense, in black ops, in intelligence, in nuclear-missile and submarine-based defenses, in insurgencies, pacifications and populace security guaranties, in the drug wars and border control and economic reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, come from?

Let alone to prepare for China's rearming, for a snarling new Russian hostility?

We don't know. We don't know what we are committing ourselves to do in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, possibly Pakistan, in all those 'out' years the White House is planning for, let alone whether we can afford it in treasure or blood.

As a nation we apparently still don't know, after five long years in Iraq, where in hell we even plan to be in 24 months, let alone in a century.

When you look at the long run all we really should keep in mind, as Paul Kennedy suggests in "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers," is that "the historical record suggests that there is a very clear connection in the long run between an individual Great Power's economic rise and fall and its growth and decline as an important military power (or world empire)."

Would this, as an American calculation of future risks, opportunities and fortunes, be congruent with the future our present government seems to be holding out for us in Iraq?

• Robert Cutts is a career journalist who has been a news reporter, magazine writer and editor, author of two nonfiction books and a college journalism teacher. He lives in Gardnerville and Japan.