I made a little note here of something that Ambassador Khalilzad said to you a moment ago. He said, “The region will not be stable until Iraq is stabilized.” It’s the one thing nobody talks about. Everyone is concerned about the United States being in the middle of a civil war inside Iraq. But they forget about the fact that if U.S. troops were to pull out of Iraq, that civil war could become a regional war between Sunnis and Shia. And the region, just in case anyone has forgotten, is the Persian Gulf, where we get most of our oil, and, I’ve talked about this before, natural gas. So, the idea of pulling out of there and letting the region, letting the national civil war expand into a regional civil war, something the United States cannot allow to happen.

And in response to a question from Tim Russert about "the long war":

It could go on, I mean, Gen. Abizaid with whom I spoke talked into terms of generations. And, if you think about two things, that’s not so hard to imagine. Number one, the Cold War after all, lasted 50 years. Uh, we didn’t know it when we began it. We didn’t know it, we didn’t know how long it was going to be when we were in the middle of it. But, it lasted half a century.

If you look back at the elements of the war against terrorism, that war was going on, and has been going on for the past 24 years. We just didn’t connect the dots. 24 years ago, the precursors of Hezbollah blew up the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. That was 1983, 241 Americans killed. In the interim between then and now you had two attacks on the World Trade Center, you had the blowing up of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, you had the attempt to blow up the U.S.S. Cole, you had the bombing of the two U.S. embassies in East Africa. This war’s already been going on for 24 years; we were just a little bit slow to recognize it.

. . . . I have this feeling that on the one hand, the Democrats are making a great deal of hay out of saying we have to get out of Iraq, and indeed we do at some point or another. But the notion that the war will be over when we pull out of Iraq, and even when we pull out of Afghanistan, you heard what Gen. Abizaid had to say, it’s not going to be over. It’s going to be a different war, but the war continues.

Several wags in the comments point out that :

Technically, America's War on Terror began in 1801. The Barbary Wars were our first encounter with Muslim terrorists. But I would bet that you would never hear that from any MSM source. But essentially, America has been at war with militant Islam for about 206 years.

And:

Technically, America's defence against the Islamic Jihad began in 1782 with the surrender of Cornwallis and subsequent Treaty of Paris.

Maybe next time Koppel is on Meet the Press he'll revise his timeline. But it's heartening to see someone of his stature point out that the war is a lot bigger than and started long before Iraq. And it's moving to see a journalist who has not stayed within the safety of the Green Zone convey the sentiments of the troops, as we read them on the milblogs every day.

Hess at a press conference on progress in Iraq, February 9th 2007: