One more war?

Today for the first time (and probably the last, since I'm about to move to California) I walked up to Pittsburgh's Soldiers and Sailors Memorial. It was closed so I couldn't go inside, but I read all the signage in front and checked out the statues and the WWII torpedo.

On either side of the steps leading up to the front door, the low retaining walls are divided into polished marble squares, each bearing the name, description and casualty statistics of one of America's wars. On the left side were the Revolutionary, 1812, Mexican, Civil and Spanish-American Wars. On the right were World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam. The descriptions were patriotic and reverent, as a good memorial should be: the Civil War pitted the Union against "Southern separatists and slaveholders. The Union was preserved." We fought in World War II in response to "the infamous sneak attack on Pearl Harbor". And in Vietnam, our forces "were superior in battle, but it was a war of attrition and containment. Public support lessened [... and] the last troops were brought home in 1975." Or whatever the year was, history isn't my thing.

There were five wars on the left and four on the right. A fifth, blank, polished marble square followed the Vietnam War's, standing ready to record one more war. Will it be the war we're fighting now in Iraq? What will that war be called when it's over? And how will the patriotic, nationalistic description of it sound? We're not responding to an infamous sneak attack this time -- unless history dares to remember this war as a response to 9/11 -- and we're not rushing to the aid of our allies like in World War I or answering the "request" of a local government to repel aggression like the wall said we did in Vietnam. And how will it end? Will we end up with two wars of attrition and containment with no public support on the same monument wall, one right after the other?

And what will the casualty numbers look like next to the other wars of the past hundred years?

And what kind of ending will this be to the wall's story of America?