Today is the 4th anniversary of the start of the War in Iraq. Four years must seem like an eternity for the families of those who’ve been deployed. But for the Americans sitting at home, flipping the channel away from the latest carnage in Baghdad, four years is little more abstract. Of course, for your beloved Fido, four years is one third of his life. And if you bought a pet rat at the start of the war, chances are it’s going to expire any day now. So Statastic decided to see which species could outlive this war if they were born on March 19, 2003.

Experts and politicians have been a little divided over the past four years about exactly how long this war would last. If Dick Cheney had been right when he notoriously predicted in March 2003 that it would be over in a matter of “weeks rather than months,” then the perishable dragonfly could have outlived this war. Or if Donald Rumsfeld’s most pessimistic estimation of a 6 month war had been correct, a monarch butterfly could have outflown the conflict.

We even had a chance of keeping your pet hamster alive if Ohio had tipped John Kerry’s way. He would have started withdrawing troops at about this time in 2005. Now it’s up to a new crop of Democrats to make promises, underbid one another on withdrawal timelines, and hope that the public notices that’s we’re 2 hamsters into this war when they got to the polls next fall.

Today’s statements from President Bush that “success will take months, not days or weeks,” indicate that this war will likely continue through 2008. Three Republican frontrunners [Giulliani, McCain, Romney] have all supported the president, proposing that we maintain or increase current troop levels. It seems that if Americans elect another Republican president, the War in Iraq may have the same life expectancy of the Tasmanian Devil it has come to resemble.

Unfortunately, the war has proven capable of outlasting our own species. More than 60,000 Iraqi civilians and 3,217 U.S. troops have died since the beginning of the war.

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