Five years ago when the United States launched the invasion of Iraq, I was in Doha, Qatar, General Tommy Frank's headquarters. Like most of the American journalists gathered there, I expected a relatively short war. That was what the military commanders were prepared for. I could not have imagined that American soldiers and Marines would still be dying in Iraq today, and that as a result of a continuing occupation, insurgency and civil war the Iraqi death toll would have reached somewhere between 80,000 and 900,000. (Iraq is in such chaos that no one knows the real figures.) So I am reluctant to speculate now on the future of Iraq, or how this seemingly endless war will play out. No one seems to have clear answers yet, not even the candidates in the race for the White House, one of whom will inherit this war.

The most useful exercise now is to look clearly at where the conflict stands today. That may suggest where things are headed in the future. For one thing, public opinion on the war seems to have shifted more in the United States than in Iraq.

A slim majority of Americans now say that going to war against Iraq was the wrong decision. On the other hand, anecdotal evidence right after the invasion suggested that most Iraqis were glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein, and polls now suggest that most of them still think their country will have a brighter future. It is true that an overwhelming majority want the American occupiers to leave, but many say “not right now.”

Among experts in military and foreign policy, both in America and abroad, there is near unanimity that military force alone will not pacify Iraq, and that a political settlement is imperative – both within Iraq and among Iraq, the United States and Iran.

Inside the country, the Iraqis are still not close to settling their political differences. There are few signs that they are ready for the ethnic, tribal and religious accommodations that will be necessary to maintain a stable government. In fact, the United States is now promoting the opposite, rearming and training the Sunnis of Anbar Province, who are the enemies of the current Shia leadership of Iraq, and also of the Shias' patrons in neighboring Iran.

Iran is one of the keys to pacifying Iraq. It fears the Sunnis who ruled Iraq until the Americans toppled Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980 and the eight-year war that followed cost Iran hundreds of thousands of lives.

Rearming the Sunnis is the most effective lever the United States now holds to coerce the Iranians into reaching an accommodation on Iran. Iran has already helped tamp down the insurgency by urging the firebrand Iraqi Shia leader Moktada al Sadr and his Mahdi Army militiamen to cool it.

The irony in all this is that by re-empowering the Iraqi Sunnis, the United States is helping the faction it went to war against in 2003.

That raises the question of what would Iraq and the Middle East have looked like several decades from now if the United States had not invaded Iraq. Would the Iraqi dictatorship have eventually imploded? After all, Saddam Hussein had run the country's economy into the sand and was maintaining his hold on power by brutal methods. Whether the Iraqis on their own would have eventually rid themselves of an unpopular dictatorship is one of the big “ifs” of this debate. But if you think the tide of history is flowing in the direction of democracy - even in the Middle East - then the answer would probably be yes. And by not invading Iraq, the United States might have saved trillions of dollars and all those American and Iraqi lives.

The question one should really ask now is not whether the invasion was a mistake. It's whether an abrupt American withdrawal from Iraq will eventually cost fewer or more lives. That, too, is not clear at this point, but the next president of the United States will have to make a decision based on his or her view of the domestic political imperatives and the implications for America's future position in the world.

It's not his or her ability to react promptly when faced with a 3 a.m. phone call that should count in this election. It's the next president's ability to think clearly about the uses of power in the world's most important office, and how Iraq fits into America's global strategy.