When Does The Hundred Years Begin?

I'm a stickler for detail. If someone like John McCain -- a straight-talker if ever there was one -- tells me the Iraq war needs to go on another hundred years, I want the facts. Such as, just a thought here, when does the hundred years begin? I can figure out when it ends, essentially at some distant point when we're all long gone.

Has the 100 years already started? So if we've already had five or six, can we subtract that from the 100 and celebrate the optimistic truth that we're practically there? Only 90-some to go?

This might be like on Seinfeld. Where it's four or five days, but today is already half over, the weekend goes fast, and you're out early on Monday. It's like a blink of an eye, hardly any time at all.

Of course 100 years, even if it's only 90-some to go, does take a while in terms of the way we reckon time by the passing of our lives. Meaning the veterans we have from the Iraq war will be doing like the guys from Normandy do every decade, going back over to salute and look around, and get together with aging Iraqi friends, etc. The big difference, unfortunately, is the war will still be raging around them. So they'll have to salute, then immediately get back in the vehicle and skedaddle out of there.

Let's say a veteran is 25 today, he's back over there when he's 75, so that's only 50 years from now. He'll be over there saluting and skedaddling, sorrowful no doubt, and thinking to himself, "Only 50 more years to go, which I'll never see." And really, most of us like to actually see the end of projects or actions we had some part in. But nevermind that in this case. There's no end in the traditional sense of things.

The milk is spilt, no reason to cry. Just need to clean it up, even if it takes a century to do so. Thank you, John McCain, for your visionary abilities, your straight-talk, and your desire to end this foul war, even if we never live to actually see it done.