More than two years after President Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” aboard an aircraft carrier, U.S. military leaders are giving a sobering assessment of progress in Iraq. In a briefing this week, the top American officer in the Middle East acknowledged that the training of Iraqi police and military units was progressing more slowly than expected. Another senior officer warned that the mission could still fail. Earlier proclamations of victory and more recent prognostications that a win was inevitable now seem shaky at best.

So far this month, there have been 21 car bombings in Baghdad. There were 25 in the city during all of last year. In the past three weeks nearly 500 people, half of them Iraqi soldiers, police officers and recruits, have been killed.

Earlier this month, U.S. forces launched an offensive called Operation Matador, along the Syrian border. No Iraqis were among the 1,000-man operation. American officers said that the lack of sufficient troops may have allowed insurgents to flee across the border or into the interior of Iraq. Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. officer there, said at a briefing this week that Iraqi security forces are behind in their ability to take over a greater part of the war effort.

In an anonymous background briefing in Baghdad, another officer warned: “I think this could still fail.”

As an e-mail that periodically makes the rounds points out, there have been successes in Iraq. Thousands of schools have been rebuilt, Iraq troops and policemen are being trained and a government is in place, although its power remains limited. For average Iraqis, however, the measure of success is whether they can safely go about their daily routine. For far too many, the answer remains “no.” For foreigners, travel is mostly out of the question outside the heavily fortified Green Zone.

Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari announced recently that he was extending for 30 days a state of emergency throughout the country, except for the three Kurdish provinces in the north. Recent comments from Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers were not reassuring either. After months of insisting that the insurgents are a bunch of misfits, Gen. Myers said: “This is a thinking and adapting adversary.” As an example he cited their recent use of vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, which are frequently used to kill Iraqi policemen and soldiers.

Worse, the general warned “one thing we know about insurgencies is that they last from, you know, three, four years to nine years.” Nine years?

How did we go from mission accomplished to the possibility of fighting an insurgency for nine years – maybe seven if you subtract the year we’ve already devoted to that cause?

U.S. leaders have long said they won’t put a timetable on American withdrawal from Iraq because this would allow opponents to plan for instability when we leave. Fair enough, but another reason may be that the American public would be shocked at the possible length of the U.S. stay.