I know what you're thinking; a melodramatic title. But what's at stake here is much more urgent and profound than the average quality of discourse on the matter would lead you to believe. An alien from outer space would look at what currently passes for debate about the Iraq war and detect absolutely nothing about the real issues at stake.

Permit me an apologia. I am inevitably read as one who supported this war from the start and will now scramble to do anything to continue to justify it and argue that success is possible. I did support this war from the start, and at this precise moment in time, I do argue for its continuation. But know this: my position is not simple inertia. Had I not possessed a naive faith in the U.S. government's ability to succeed in 2003, I would not have supported this war; my position today is based on what I see now as the consequences of their earlier failures, which we need to confront urgently. Anyone who wants to discuss these consequences needs to be able to refer to what we learnt from our earlier experiences, but also not be too wed to his or her views in 2003, 2004 or 2005. By my frank admission that I was naive and wrong in 2003, 2004 and 2005, I hope you will think seriously about what I have to say now.

This write-up has been occasioned by the release of the White House report on the Iraqi government's progress on benchmarks. The result of this report: eight satisfactory marks, eight unsatisfactory, and two categories not rated. A perfect split, and you would have been foolish to expect anything other. This report was always going to show some good and some bad, and hence was always a terrible indicator of what to do next: as if anyone could reasonably expect the surge to show revolutionary progress in a few short months. Let's just quickly recap all the damage that had been done to Iraq before the Americans even realized what was going on and initiated this new strategy, their first proactive and decisive change of tack.

Saddam Hussein's dictatorship did catastrophic damage to the relations between Sunni and Shi'ite in Iraq and created personal and communal animosities which are well within living memory. Then, the Americans arrived, their leaders convinced that Saddam Hussein was essentially Hitler and they were re-enacting World War II for the MTV generation: the same results with an even cheaper price. The drive to Berlin from Normandy was called Operation Cobra. Guess what the drive to Baghdad was called? Cobra II.
Because Iraq was Germany and Saddam was Hitler, they believed all that was necessary was to get rid of the dictator and the rest would sort itself out, because the only dichotomy that they saw between people in Iraq was the regime (oppresive) and "the Iraqi people" (oppressed). Had these people really been disciplies of Leo Strauss, they might have pondered for a second the close relationship between a regime and the sort of man it feeds off and engenders, and the fact that there is no dictatorship on a countrywide scale without hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of little dictators. Saddam Hussein didn't have a gun to the head of every Iraqi; every Iraqi had a gun, and it was either oriented outward from within the regime, or downward in shame and defeat.

Given this reality, it seemed just about the worst thing one might do was to decapitate the regime and tell everyone to go home, thanks for playing. Because the Iraqis didn't go home to create a magical democratic wonderland, they went home to brood on past injustice and to worry incessantly about the future. It's called a security dilemma: armed groups are constantly insecure about each other's intentions, and they often decide to act first to try and gain the upper hand rather than wait out events and hope that the other group doesn't decide to take the initiative. It's especially operative where groups have already spent decades despising and killing one another.

And what has happened since that glorious day when Saddam was gone? The Iraqis have killed each other in ever increasing numbers, while the Americans largely sat by and watched, afraid that if they interfered they might make themselves even more despised. Let's please abandon this notion of poor, virginal Iraq clamped beneath the corrupting and murderous American jackboot. There has never been more than one American soldier for every ninety Iraqis, and nowadays the figure is more like one for every two hundred. The U.S. military footprint turns out to have been made by a stiletto, not a jackboot; and that's precisely the problem. The Americans aren't directly responsible for the large number of deaths occuring in Iraq every day, the Iraqis are: but the Americans created these conditions and then did nothing to stop the acceleration of the violence. They broke it, and in my moral university that means they ought to do something about fixing it.

Here I'm likely to run into another objection: that the departure of American forces from Iraq will somehow stop the violence, as if death and evil only existed in this world due to the projection of American power. I've got news for you: if you think Iraq is violent now, you wouldn't want to see it after American troops withdrew. Before the surge, armed groups in Baghdad vied to gain advantages against one another which could be exploited when coalition forces withdraw, as they eventually must - one way or another. While the political process is moribund and security is uncertain, armed groups seek these advantages over one another by force. They reason that whoever controls the most of Baghdad when full sovereignty is restored will control the destiny of Iraq; and they conclude correctly. In concrete terms, this would mean the brutal expulsion of the capital's Sunni population to the western part of the country, from where they would proceed to make war against Shia Baghdad.