Iraq's report card is out and it is up to us to determine what sort of future it possibly faces.

No doubt the surge strategy has worked well in the Anbar province, and here I want to give credit to all the brave men and women who have contributed to the over 45% decrease in civilian deaths (natural deaths naturally exempted) since December of last year. Expectedly though, the casualty rate is still far too high.

However, though militarily the surge's objective are being met, the question still hangs whether it remains a viable solution especially in the long-term. Is it  just something put in place to gain political momentum for Bush or is it a strategy that can give Iraqis genuine hope for security and stability?

From what I see, the surge is more of the former; realistically it is a stop-gap measure more than anything else. Republicans obviously hope that the Anbar province model can be repeated elsewhere, but certain realities on the ground, perhaps not totally reflected in the report by General Petraeus, show that there is scarce reason still to be optimistic.

Firstly, the impossibility of sustaining such increases in troop deployment will mean that the US military cannot by its own resources replicate another example. Recruitment and re-enlistment rates for the US military are at all time low, hugely because of the agonizing long periods of deployment overseas. Additionally, do keep in mind that certain circumstances were in favour at Anbar - the populace is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim (America's most recent best friends) and that it is one of the lowest densely populated Iraqi provinces. It will be difficult to run into such luck in tactical terms elsewhere. The US army is stretched far too thin these days.

Secondly and more critically, it is stressed that this surge strategy is merely to allow Al Maliki to buy more time for his "dysfunctional" government and the Iraqi Armed Forces. On this front, things are not rosy either. I got a chill when in the papers this morning - Al Maliki boasted that more than "14,000 Al Qaeda fighters have turned against violence and joined the Iraqi Armed Forces". The dark tragic humour in this is how the Iraqi security forces are rife with traitors and informants, sabotaging efforts from within. Makes you wonder how many out of that 14,000 have had a faithful change of heart.

How long can the US hold out with the surge? I fear that not long enough for Al-Maliki and the rest of Iraq to get its act together due to the pressure by the Democrats and the majority of the American public in general for withdrawals.

It's hard to draw a conclusion on whether the Democrats or the Republicans have the better plan for Iraq. Both ways, in my opinion, will lead to tragedy for the Iraqi people. The surge strategy, though a political boost for the Republicans back in the USA, seems to offer no concrete solution for the Iraqi man on the streets outside of Baghdad and Anbar. If the Democrats have their way on emphasizing troops withdrawals, the safety of American lives may be assured, but there is a high potential for Iraq to slip back (or further, depending on you) into anarchy. It is timely to be mindful of the devastating economic impact of an Iraq that has slipped fully into sectarian civil war, seeing as how it lies smack in the middle of OPEC.

America cannot reverse the fact that it was an astonishingly bad call to go into Iraq back in 2003. Let's see how the pieces can be mended together.