Conrad Crane, director of the US Army military history institute, was one of several experts drawing the conclusion that the United States must prepare itself for a long stay in Iraq or risk seeing the situation devolve to chaos requiring fresh intervention.

"Our long term presence will help ensure that we don't have to come back later for a much much bigger conflict," Crane said.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East Mark Kimmitt agreed Tuesday that stability was key.

"As President Bush put it, a successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations," he told a conference here.

In 2008 and beyond he said, "the surge will be a success, if gains in security can be translated into gains in stability."

On January 10, 2007, President George W. Bush announced the dispatch of an additional 20,000 soldiers to Iraq, bringing the number of US troops there to 160,000, in the hopes of checking endemic violence and creating conditions for the Iraqi government to make progress on the political front.

A year later, and almost five years after the invasion of Iraq, the "surge" strategy, including a vast offensive in February 2007 in the Iraqi capital and the rest of the country, seems to have borne some fruit, opening the way for the withdrawal of some 30,000 US troops by mid-2008.

A recent report by the US administration says that attacks have decreased by 62 percent in Iraq since March, and the number of US military and Iraqi civilian casualties have dropped markedly in recent months, although there have were a record 901 US troop deaths in Iraq in 2007, according to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, an independent group which tracks military casualties there.

Washington and Baghdad say the mobilization of Sunni militias against Al-Qaeda, and a cease-fire declared by the Moqtada Sadr's Shiite milita, the Mahdi Army, have contributed to the decrease in violence.

But diplomats and military officials say the lull may not last if several key questions are not rapidly addressed by the central government, such as the sharing of oil revenues, among other measures aimed at reconciling Iraq's varied communities.

Also, "will the Shiite government recognize that the Concerned Local Citizens movement is the best way to end the insurgency? And will it accept to integrate them in security forces?" Kimmitt said, refering to 70,000 Sunni militiamen on the US payroll to fight Al-Qaeda.

Will the Sunni militiamen, in turn, pledge their allegiance to the central government? Kimmitt queried, noting that "Al Qaeda remains a potent force" in Iraq.

The Sunni militia are regarded with distrust by the Iraqi government, and numerous observers have warned that Washington's rearming of Sunni groups is risky.

For Stephen Biddle, an expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, Iraq's civil war could be close to ending if progress continues, but US troops will have to stay in the country to maintain the peace.

"If these trends continue, we may be in a moment that historians looking back in 20 years will consider to have been a fundamental change in the situation. But if so, it is not a change in the situation that allows us to bring the troops home in the kind of numbers that many now would like us to do," he said.

"If current trends continue we could reach a nationwide ceasefire, but we will remain necessary as peacekeepers. That would demand a level of US commitment in Iraq that would preclude a dramatic near term drawndown in US troops level," he went on.

Crane, the military historian, drew a parallel between the US presence in Iraq and in Korea.

"In 1948, in Korea, we tried to put together a government just so that we could leave. And we left behind a fragile government split by sectarian divides, fighting an insurgency and very vulnerable to aggressive neighbors.

"As a result, three years later, we were back in a much bigger conflict. We face that in Iraq," he said.

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