It took the United States four years to get out of Vietnam. Whether the nation likes it or not — and the Phoenix does not — it will probably take America at least that long to exit Iraq.

After two days of General David Petraeus’s sorry congressional testimony, it is painfully clear that President Bush plans to keep US troops engaged for the remaining 15 months of his term. Bush’s policy: it’s a problem for the next guy or gal. With the leading Republican presidential candidates all committed to staying the president’s disastrous course, and most Democratic contenders holding that it will take more or less 18 months to decamp, it is depressingly realistic to set 2011 as the earliest possible end date of the Iraqi debacle.

Then again, at the moment, even the idea of an end date for this war is a relative concept. It’s likely that troops will be stationed in the northern third of Iraq, a quasi-independent state controlled by the Kurds, long after we leave Iraq itself. In addition, a substantial force will probably be maintained offshore or in Kuwait. Bush’s “mission accomplished” is to be followed by a seemingly endless Iraq-and-broader-regional engagement of some sort. And his announcement that 30,000 troops will come home next summer is window dressing, meaningless in the big picture — though good news for the men and women involved.

Indicative of the Bush Administration’s cynical manipulation of the nation’s all-volunteer military is its treatment of military leaders. It punished generals who failed to conform to White House thinking. It duped its own secretary of state — retired General Colin Powell, a former Joint Chiefs chairman — into falsely claiming before the United Nations that the late Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. And in the months before this week’s unconvincing Washington testimony, it sought to establish General Petraeus as the final arbiter of the success or failure of the troop “surge” that was to stabilize the Iraq chaos.

But whatever limited political success Petraeus achieved on Monday before members of the House of Representatives was pathetically compromised on Tuesday when he was unable — or unwilling — to reassure retiring Republican senator John Warner, of Virginia, that the nation was safer because of our presence in Iraq. “Sir,” Petraeus had responded, “I don’t know, actually.”

People have long internalized the fact that Bush lied to get us into Iraq. But when the general choked on his answer, the futility of approximately 3700 uniformed deaths and the incalculable number of those who have been wounded and permanently maimed became sickeningly clear. And those statistics do not account for the anarchy and civil war that claimed at least 1773 Iraqi civilian lives in August, between 1753 and 1760 in July, and 1227 in June. There’s no way of telling how many total have died; the US, for their part, stopped collecting such numbers in 2005.

The Petraeus testimony was designed to solidify a sufficient sliver of shrinking congressional support to buy the administration more time — though for what is unclear. The only potential boon to emerge from Petraeus’s testimony is that it might provoke others to set a fixed timetable for withdrawal.

Those in the still-newly-elected Democratic congressional majority have a powerful fear of being labeled “surrender monkeys” by the criminally irresponsible crazies in the White House. Meanwhile, the deaths and casualties continue.

About a month ago, Bush’s “war czar,” Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, raised the possibility that Washington could reinstate conscription. Few paid much attention to his words. Perhaps they should have. The draft, last employed during the Vietnam War, was ended by President Nixon in 1973 in order to defuse wide-spread, anti-war sentiments. But for reasons that are equally understandable and absurd, Washington today is paralyzed by Bush’s war. It knows that Iraq is straining the military. The breaking point is expected to come shortly before Bush leaves office.

This strongly suggests that if the Iraq madness is not concluded, the draft could be revived. It is hard to imagine the political consequences of such a development. Paralysis today may finally lead to political revolt tomorrow.

Good news for the arts
It began with a series of studies sponsored by the Boston Foundation, and it gained political traction when House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi recognized a good idea when he saw one. As a result, 62 arts organization from Provincetown to the Berkshires are now receiving $16.7 million to invest in refurbishing their facilities.

Having finally recognized that the arts in our state generate more revenue than all of our professional sports franchises combined, state leaders have said these grants will be only the first in what promises to be a multi-year program aimed at growing the Massachusetts economy by investing in tourism. Thanks to the state’s rich array of cultural institutions, after all, it is the Bay State’s second biggest industry. Better still, due to creative financial thinking, this is being done with no additional cost to taxpayers. The challenge now is going to will be to keep keeping this program in place. Next year is just as important as today.