We’ll talk with military families behind two long wars about what it takes to keep the home fires burning.

Talk about awkward.
The United States and Iraq are negotiating a new legal framework for U.S. military operations in Iraq. A new “status of forces agreement.”
And Iraq’s prime minister stands up and says the negotiations aren’t working. That they’re at an impasse. That Iraq’s demands are unacceptable to the U.S. and U.S. demands [...]

We look at the meaning and uncertain milestone of 4,000 U.S. troops dead in Iraq.
Guests:
Tom Bowman, Pentagon correspondent for NPR.
Alissa Rubin, Deputy Baghdad Bureau Chief for the New York Times.
Anthony Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
Rosemary Palmer, mother of Lance Corporal Augie Schraeder who was serving [...]

Five years in, President Bush now says the Iraq war has brought the United States to the brink of a great strategic victory. Many others call the war the greatest strategic blunder in American history.
Either way, there are decisions to be made. If we should stay, how long? If we should go, how fast? How [...]

Five years ago today, the “shock and awe” bombardment was ending in Baghdad, and U.S. troopers were pouring over the border from Kuwait into Iraq.
They were not told to expect a five-year slog: longer, as Barack Obama now puts it, than World War I, longer than World War II, longer than the Civil War.
In this [...]

Pennsylvania Democrat Patrick Murphy is the only Iraq War veteran in Congress.
He can tell you all about driving into enemy fire in a Humvee without adequate armor; losing the battles for Iraqi hearts and minds; the strategic blunders of the Bush administration; the high price and pain of long deployments, and the 19 comrades who [...]

In the glare of presidential campaign lights and stock market bonfires, it’s almost possible for the war in Iraq to disappear.
But not if you’re a soldier, or an Iraqi, or cutting the checks in Washington, or feeling the strain at the Pentagon.
Iraq’s Defense Minister says U.S. troops will be needed for another decade. John McCain [...]

It feels like we’ve seen this before: US troops make progress in Iraq, while Iraq’s political and ethnic divide appears as vast as ever.
And yet something real has happened on the ground: the terrible bloodletting brought on by the fall of Saddam has ebbed. Neighborhoods are quieter. And as promised, the first drawdown of US [...]

After World War II, some 8 million veterans came home and went to college on the GI Bill, helping create the American middle class. Now, the latest generation of vets — battle-tried in Iraq and Afghanistan — is coming home, and many are going to college.
They’ve got less help from Uncle Sam, but they are [...]

Iraq has the world’s third largest proven reserves of oil, and they’re barely tapped. This week, the price of oil reached $82 dollars a barrel — the highest in history. And Alan Greenspan says in his new memoir that, at least for him, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was “largely about oil.”
Iraq’s ocean of oil [...]

Americans overwhelmingly say they oppose the war in Iraq, but the war in Iraq goes on.
So, where’s the antiwar movement?
Well, it’s all over — and nowhere. It’s in Congress, among Democrats and some Republicans. It was in the streets of Washington, D.C. this weekend, with a few thousand protestors chanting and marching. It was in [...]

The stated goal of the U.S. troop “surge” in Iraq was to create breathing room for political reconciliation in Baghdad. That has not happened.
But reporting to Congress this week, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are pushing for patience — a pullback, next year, of the surge, but an open-ended U.S. military commitment in [...]

Roughly 120 people have died in sectarian violence since the bombing Wednesday in Baghdad that destroyed the golden dome of one of Shiite’s most holy shrines. Many worry this could be the spark that ignites an all-out civil war in Iraq.
Sunnis announced Thursday they would withdraw from talks to form a new government in protest [...]