People everywhere respect what is most remote and least liable to have its reputation put to the test. At the least reverse, many would look down on us, and would join our enemies against us. Thucydides

The latest news from Iraq shifts our attention from the fighting in Falluja, Baghdad and Najaf to the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. 60 Minutes did the right thing to distribute those pictures, and the reaction from our leaders has been altogether too predictable: "How can that be? Who would have thought? This is not typical. What's going on here?" You can also see them thinking: “What’s the best method of damage control? Who should hang? How should I protect myself?”

After everything else we’ve seen, how else would we expect people in Washington to react? Who will take responsibility for something like that? The problem with our reactions is, we’ve already consented silently to this kind of treatment for our prisoners. How do people think we are treating the prisoners in Guantanamo right now? Palestinians have long charged the Israelis with using similar methods, and we have not objected. Whether the locale is Guantanamo or Jerusaelem, we've adopted the same position on the matter as the Israelis: when it comes to stopping people who want to blow up little children in shopping centers, the ends justify the means.

We react to abuse of Iraqi prisoners with indignation because we have a bad war on our conscience. Iraqis are not our enemies. We want them to like us. But we know that if an army invaded our country and then occupied it, we would stand up to them, just as they have stood up to us. We know those prisoners are in Abu Ghraib because we're in their country when we shouldn't be. That's far different from the case of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, who brought their war to us.

So now those contractors and reservists are going to pay, probably with prison time, for their acts. Someone has to pay, and the perpetrators will be the ones. They took pictures of themselves and their victims, ugly snapshots to show how much fun they were having. It's not often you have this kind of fun! Let's have a party! How can you not think of Schindler’s List, with its image of naked men and women running laps in the prison yard of Auschwitz, when you see the pile of naked bodies in Abu Ghraib? But some of those guards, even though they're guilty, will be scapegoats nevertheless. We'll be so indignant about the acts of sadistic guards, we’ll overlook the crime that put them in charge of those Iraqi prisoners to begin with. Yes, all wars are ugly, most especially wars that were wrong from the beginning.

Distractions: Where Are the Weapons?

In fact, we've been distracting ourselves from this question of right and wrong from the start. I've heard these arguments so often: "If our leaders say it's the right thing to do, it must be the right thing to do." Another is, "We have to get the terrorists." Well, who are the terrorists? Anyone we don't like and anyone we're afraid of? Where is the cold, ruthless focus on the people who actually want to do us harm?

The last big distraction from our guilt was several months ago, when it became apparent at last that we weren't going to find dangerous weapons in Iraq. We were all discussing whether the intelligence agencies were to blame for feeding bad analysis to the president and his advisors. The premise of the whole controversy was that if we had found weapons, our invasion would have been justified. As it was, we made a big mistake that hurt our credibility, and we have to find out who is to blame. But this effort to blame the CIA for bad information misses two important points.

The first one is that this war wouldn't be justified even if Hussein did have the weapons Bush said he had. We had already conducted air operations over Iraq for a long time, and if we discovered weapons or materials we wanted to get rid of, we could have done so easily, just as the Israelis did when they bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor a generation ago. We did not need to bomb Baghdad and send in 200,000 troops to get rid of dangerous weapons. We needed to do that to get rid of Hussein, and that was clearly our aim.

The other point we managed to miss during the intelligence controversy is that Bush clearly cooked up any argument he thought would succeed during the lead-up to war. He even said that Hussein helped to carry out the 9/11 attacks, and people believed him! For Bush, it didn't matter whether Hussein actually had any weapons. What mattered was that he wanted them, and in a post-9/11 environment, anyone who could be dangerous in the future had to be removed.

In January I read an article about Dr. Kay's departure as head of the Iraq Survey Group, the team charged with finding Iraq's chemical and biological weapons. He said his team had not found the weapons because they are not there: Hussein and his lieutenants got rid of them after the Persian Gulf War. Jane Harman, senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Dr. Kay's finding made it clear "that there had been a massive intelligence failure." President Bush got it wrong, Harman said, and he "owes the American public and the world an explanation."

How this president manages to elicit such ineffective arguments from his opponents, I can't figure. During the lead-up to the war, people kept saying that we should give the UN inspectors more time to find Hussein's weapons, an argument that even its proponents didn't expect to succeed. Ms. Harman's charge of a "massive intelligence failure" is similarly doomed because it's not true. Who can name one intelligence professional who thought Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States? Analysts parsed the evidence they had, presented a mixed picture, and gave Bush enough uncertainties to make his case. By and large, the Central Intelligence Agency did not endorse the claim that Hussein possessed chemical or biological weapons that he could deploy against us in a surprise attack.

On the contrary, the CIA said the evidence tended to support the conclusion that inspectors presented to the UN late in 2002. The UN report said that whatever weapons Hussein might have had at the time of the Persian Gulf War in 1992, he did not have an active chemical or biological weapons program in 2003. When someone asks President Bush to explain how he could go to war against Iraq when they didn't have actual weapons, only some evidence of a desire to obtain them, he replies, "What's the difference?"

Well I can tell you that history's judgment of President Bush will be harsh, because there's a big difference. Let's say Bush was right, though: the possession of such weapons and the desire to obtain them amount to the same thing. President Bush would still be guilty of aggression. He uses a doctrine of preemption to justify his aggression against Iraq, but the doctrine is horribly misdirected. No matter what he does now, he has taken the United States down a path that will lead, ultimately, to its decline and disappearance.

Let's step back from narrow arguments about whether or not Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and take a look at what President Bush has done. He has invaded another country not only with no support from the United Nations, but with its active opposition. In the eyes of most of the rest of the world, there's no difference in principle between the action we took in 2003 and Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1991. I can't see how they're wrong. We call the fighters in Iraq who kill our soldiers insurgents, and claim they are enemies of freedom. But if another country invaded the United States and kept an occupying army here, would it matter to you what kind of government the invaders replaced? Wouldn't you fight if you could to make the invaders leave, no matter how vicious the old regime had been?

Paranoia and Good Will

Back in the early days of the Cold War, George Kennan or one of the other wise men saw that paranoia sanctioned as official policy could prove harmful for both the United States and the Soviet Union. “Anyone,” he wrote, “is free to think the whole world is his enemy, and if he believes it long enough, it'll be true." You can be so aggressive in your self-defense that everyone hates you. Even here, however, Bush and his people give themselves away. If they really believed in their own doctrine of preemption, they'd pull out of Iraq and go on to the next dangerous character on their axis of evil list. The list is pretty long, you know. In fact, they want to stick it out in Iraq, because their real motive was to get Hussein, and to make an example of Iraq to the rest of the world. See what we can do to a tyrant like that, and how we can reshape his country in our image? See what will happen to you if you mess with us?

Now a lot more people want to mess with us. And they will. They already have. We can't pull out of Iraq for fear that it'll become another Afghanistan, racked by civil war and home to radical Islamists who can train and plot and organize. We can't stay unless we truly want to become an occupying, not a liberating power. The measures we must use as an occupying power are a lot harsher than the measures used in Abu Ghraib prison. Ask the families in Falluja who lost brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, what occupying powers have to do to "pacify" a defeated nation.

We have no business in Iraq, and we have already paid too much for our mistake. We’ve been counting the dollars spent, but who can remember now the good will that flowed toward our shores in the weeks and months after 9/11? Tony Blair's was only the most eloquent voice: he spoke for the rest of our brothers and sisters all over the world, all those people who had themselves suffered the scourge of radical Islam and other vicious movements for decades. Now the United States, the most powerful member of the international community, could lead good and brave people everywhere in a cause that was right and necessary. Positive action had been too long in coming, but now the people who lay buried under the concrete of the World Trade Center required some response. Justice required punishment, prevention, and perseverance. We had the opportunity to fight a just war, and to do much good with the help of others.

What a laughable understatement it is now to say that we squandered the good will we had two and a half years ago! We wanted, needed, and had the support of good Muslims everywhere, people who recognized the totalitarian threat that Al Qaeda and its sympathizers posed to their own civilization. We had allies everywhere, people who would help us without our even asking for help. Among those who saw 9/11 not only as a tragedy but also as an opportunity, moderate Muslims would see the possibilities for reconciliation and mutual assistance most clearly. Instead, we went nuts. We killed so many people who had nothing to do with the war we were involved in. So many people who wished us no harm, and nothing but good.

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I need to make a few more points here. One has to do with what we should have done in 2002 instead of planning a war with Iraq, and what we can still do in our fight against Al Qaeda. Another has to do with the place criticism of this sort has in post-Vietnam America. A related point concerns the origins of my own judgments on this matter. And the last issue concerns what we have to do in Iraq right now, to keep a bad situation from spawning a much wider loss. For make no mistake, we could lose our special place in the world for good here. We could follow a course that will lead historians two centuries from now to say, "Here is where it started. Here was the beginning of the end for America's supreme position in the world."

The Big Picture and World History

Before I take up these points, though, let me recall another thought that has come to mind many times since 9/11. In the days after that appalling event, we all could see our need for someone like Winston Churchill to lead us. We need someone with his eloquence, his faith, his sense of aggressive perseverance, and his defiance. He was Europe's last great defender of democracy and freedom as Hitlerism flourished across the continent. But for him, the Nazis might have established themselves in Europe for much more than four years. In the current clash of civilizations, we need someone like that, and after 9/11 I didn't see anyone able to take that role.

Then Bush gave his speech to the joint session of Congress, and one could feel a bit more hopeful about our leadership. The speech was well-written and well-delivered: Bush issued a resolute, decisive response to our enemies and a clear request for action to our friends. Then we went to war in Afghanistan, and for once we had allies who would actually fight. The northern alliance, as the soldiers fighting the Taliban were called, proved willing to fight hard, and the victory was theirs with our assistance from the air. Things looked better as we had the former rulers of that long-suffering country on the run.

After that war, we needed to plan what to do next. Who could have expected, during that time, that the administration had already set its military sights on Iraq, and had done so from the first days after 9/11? They even thought that Iraq could be a repeat of Afghanistan. Our agile force had succeeded so quickly in Afghanistan - we could do the same thing with our other enemy across the way, and finish off the work we had started during the Gulf War ten years ago. Richard Clarke said that Bush asked him right after 9/11 to find out if Hussein had some connection with the attack. Clarke was astonished. "But Mr. President," he said, "It was Al Qaeda." "I know, I know," the president responded, "But look into it anyway." Clarke wrote later that the war against Iraq represented colossal misdirection. It was as if the United States, after the attack at Pearl Harbor, had attacked Mexico.

Well, here's what we should have done in Afghanistan. We should have put a lot more troops on the ground during the war itself. We should have made sure the victory was ours, not a victory for the warlords in the northern alliance. Most assuredly we should have allied ourselves with them, but we should have directed the war from the ground, not primarily from the air. After the war, we should have consolidated our position there. We should have put 500,000 troops on the ground there, even if we don't have 500,000 troops on active duty right now. We should have found the people somewhere, and made Afghanistan an outpost, just as we did over the years with Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We could have achieved more progress against Al Qaeda from that outpost than from any other place, and most Afghanis would have welcomed us there. What an opportunity we had to bring peace and prosperity to much of south Asia, and to serve our own interests at the same time.

Our leaders want to build an example of American democracy in Iraq. Wolfowitz has been clear enough about that. Reagan wanted to extend American democracy to the whole world, by means of our example. But when you conquer a country and use force to establish democracy, that's called building an empire. Any objective assessment of what we're doing in Iraq confirms that we're building an empire there. It'd be great if our leaders had the honesty to say that's what we're doing. Then the torture in Abu Ghraib would fit into the pattern, and Bush couldn't say on Arab television, "That's not the America I know." Because the war he started in Iraq will make America into just that sort of state, one that has to engage in torture and endless warfare to maintain its authority.

I didn't plan to reach so far back in history to make my case. Rome is a relevant example of what a master state has to do to maintain its power. To fight and win in Iraq, we have to be like Rome was. Roman garrisons were always on the scene, fighting, crushing, intimidating, crucifying, besieging, killing, enslaving, destroying, occupying. Their destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD in a long-running war with the Jews is the example we're most aware of here. Our empire isn't like the Roman empire. We have an empire because people want to be like us. Our empire isn't based on force: it's based on freedom and the example of democracy. Bush still thinks we can bring democracy to Iraq. But the April battles all across the country in Iraq show that the use of military force is the only means to victory there. And if we use force to win, we'll be like the Romans, not Americans.

After the visible actions in the urban battlefields, we should remember the invisible activities that an occupying state engages in: imprisonment, rape, and torture, suppression of free speech and assembly, denial of all the rights we said belong to the Iraqis. We saw it in the Russian empire, and more benign, gentlemanly forms of it in the British empire. We already did a lot of these things when we conquered native Americans in the nineteenth century. Now we're developing these well known patterns of behavior in Iraq, and we're using the same justification that empire-builders have used in the past: you'll be better off if you submit to us. In his speech at Westminster, Reagan referred to the slave revolt Spartacus led against the Romans. It was an example that should inspire freedom-loving people everywhere, he said. Reagan would understand why the Iraqis are resisting us. They might not have freedom after we leave, but they certainly won't have it while we're there.

Here is another world historical note, one that looks to the future. China wants to succeed us as the world's preeminent power. They would like to acquire the military power necessary to challenge us. A transition to new leadership in the world used to seem a long way off. A hundred years or more is a long time, and after our victory in the Cold War, we weren't so inclined to look that far ahead. We had a comfortable sense of well-being about our position as the only global power.

Now, after 9/11, things don't look so comfortable anymore. We need a Winston Churchill not just because we need someone who is capable and aggressive in the face of evil, but also because we need someone who knows why we're fighting. If we fight to establish an empire in the Middle East, we're going to hasten our time of weakness, and hasten the time when other powers take over from us. We have already started to lose the so-called soft power that has made American culture so attractive everywhere. We can become irrelevant faster than we think. If people perceive weakness in place of strength, corruption in place of rectitude, they will look elsewhere for their leadership.

So I understand why Bush went on television to influence people's perceptions about the torture in Iraqi prisons. The only effective way to change people's minds about us, however, is to admit our mistakes and get out of there. If we don't do that, we'll be seen for what we actually are: an occupying power. The Iraqis might have hoped for liberation from a country that would shut down Hussein’s torture chambers, but as Jon Stewart put it, they are “really not shut down so much as under new management.” We can try to understand the organizational factors that explain how this kind of mistreatment occurred, but the people in Iraq and in other countries nearby won't be so understanding. They just want us out of there, and now. The harder we fight to stay, the worse it's going to be for us.

Journalist Cal Trillin reminded people during an interview, “This is war we’re talking about.” If you know your neighbor is committing terrible crimes in his house, you don’t go out and shoot him. You call the police. Well, the United Nations isn’t exactly the police, but we have signed on to – and we used to lead – a world order where no nation would undertake war by itself unless it faced an immediate threat. Saddam didn’t offer us an immediate threat, no matter what Bush claimed. The desirability of getting rid of him, and of building a democracy in Iraq, are strong reasons for starting a war, but they are not sufficient. If replacing tyrants with democratically elected governments were sufficient to justify and even require an invasion, we would have invaded Cuba, North Korea, more governments in Africa than I can name, and yes, even China under Mao.

Why not China? Well it’s too strong and we don’t want to start a world war. Why not North Korea? China wouldn’t like it – they already fought us over that piece of territory. Why not Cuba? We tried and we blew it and we figure we better not try again. The Cold War is over anyway. So how do we pick our democracy building targets? The present war argues that we should go for friendless, weak nations that have strategic value because of geography or natural resources, and where building a democracy will benefit the region as a whole. That fits the Iraqi case pretty well. Is that the kind of principle we want to establish in the world? Under that principle, other countries see that we have used our power aggressively, and they’ve reacted as you might expect: with fear, hate, and anger.

Altogether, the empire we built during World War II and the Cold War had some pretty unusual qualities. It looked like an empire, but for the most part we didn’t fight aggressive wars, and the threats we responded to were pretty easy to identify. We didn’t have to cook them up. Bush says Hussein supported terrorists, but by that reasoning we should conquer Syria, Libya, Iran, Pakistan, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, Sudan, Yemen, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and…I suppose many more would make the list if I pulled out an atlas. Do we want to say that out of all these candidates we picked on Iraq because it was particularly vulnerable, because Hussein was especially horrific, because our president had it in for him?

No matter how good the reasons offered for this war, they come down to: we wanted to get him, we could do it, so we did. We’ve gone to war on shaky, ambiguous grounds before, but this is the first time we have engaged in aggression that was in clear violation of an international order we created. No country, especially in the Middle East and South Asia, can now trust us to pursue our interests in a way that respects sovereignty. These are countries that we need to have on our side in order to win the war against Al Qaeda. Our enemy bloodied us on September 11, and instead of organizing the world to crush the people who did it, we turned into a reckless bully. We used September 11 to justify a war that had nothing to do with September 11.

No country argued that we should not fight in Afghanistan. Most countries, including Islamic states in the Middle East, correctly hoped we would win that war. We did not have to justify the fight because Al Qaeda and the Taliban constituted such an obvious threat, and force was the only way to deal with it. We had a grateful population, and every possibility of establishing Afghanistan as a strong outpost against our enemies, just as we had earlier with Japan, South Korea, and Germany. Instead we let our opportunity dribble away, and our position there today is no stronger than it was two years ago. To defeat this enemy, we need to know a great deal about it, and we have to rally our allies against it every day. Instead we forsook the place where we could learn the most about our enemy, and we engaged in a war that alienated almost every state that wanted to help us.

Vietnam, Personal Reflections, and Our Soldiers

We haven’t done any of the things we should have done. Instead we started a war that has roused the ghost of our first defeat: Vietnam. Now opponents of the Iraqi war have to apologize for their stand, assuring their audience that they actually do have some backbone, and that they are not one of those anti-war throwbacks from the sixties, who recall those times with a kind of warped nostalgia. Who would wish for that sort of political divisiveness again? Who would wish for a time when patriotism was dishonorable, and our military men and women received mockery and spittle in the face as they arrived home from their tours of duty in Vietnam? The memories of that time are still so vivid, that criticism of the war in Iraq comes under suspicion because the speaker is undermining our troops, not giving them the support they need.

It's not so: opponents of this war believe in the goodness, the abilities and the fortitude of our soldiers as much as ever. Now the families, the moms and dads of those soldiers are beginning to question this war and the reasons for fighting it, and I thank them for it. They've made it possible for others to speak more freely about the horrible thing we've done, without having to apologize because we're making our soldiers' jobs more difficult.

Opposition to this war and support of our troops easily go together. In fact, opposition to this war and support of our troops have to go together, because we have to get our fighting men and women out of there. We can't support a government that puts our young people in harm's way for bad reasons. Our young people shouldn't have to pay for other people's mistakes and poor judgment. They shouldn't have to come home in anonymous coffins, victims of a war where, for the first time in our history, we are clearly guilty of aggression. If we have to have victims, let our battlefield casualties come from the mountains in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, where our real enemies are hiding, and fighting.

What makes me and other opponents of the war qualified to speak in a voice that’s not a throwback from the sixties? I studied international politics, and the ethics of war and peace, for a long time. I wrote my first book on the logic of conflict, and I spent a long time analyzing the Arab-Israeli conflict to find lessons and insights into international war. I wrote and taught about mutual perception and misperception, the use of force, the significance of international law, the necessity for violence and the establishment of peace in relations among states.

More than that, I served in the Navy for over four years, during the period when we first sent ships to the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. I served in the Western Pacific when the Iranian hostage crisis began, and my ship was among the first to go to that remote part of the world's oceans. I know what it's like to serve in the military, how dangerous the job is, and the devotion our soldiers and sailors show in the execution of their duties.

I joined the Navy in 1977, a year out of college, as a junior officer. This kind of thing was unthinkable among my peers. Our military defeat, loss of men and bitter humiliation in southeast Asia still hung over our culture, and especially over our youth at that time. Joining any branch of the military, especially if you were from the north and from the upper middle class, was not something you did. After the war in Vietnam, people regarded the armed services a something like a failed cult. It didn't come back to its place of honor and respect until the Reagan years, and Reagan himself can claim credit for that restoration. Patriotism and admiration for our armed forces have burned with a steady light since then.

So that's why the reports of abuse in Iraqi prisons pose such a threat to our self-respect. We don't have to go far in our memories before we encounter My Lai and other uncomfortable legacies of Vietnam. It's not going to be enough to say that war is nasty, and that's what happens when you start one. It's not going to be enough to say that the perpetrators were following orders, that they weren't well trained or that they were poorly supervised. They're going to be made into scapegoats, and the self-righteous men and women who committed the greater crime will be self-righteous about these poor soldiers as well. And I don't say poor soldiers because I think what they did is okay, or because I think they don't deserve punishment for what they did.

I say it because at least some of those guards probably did what they did to go along with their buddies. Sadistic leaders wanted to soften the prisoners up for interrogation, or to punish them for getting out of line. They already regarded their prisoners as animals, and they would prove it. Now the only way for an underling soldier to do the right thing is to stand out from the group, to refuse to go along, to make yourself conspicuous for your disobedience. And that's about the hardest thing for anyone to do, because refusal to go along means ostracism, and when you're far away from home, away from your family and other anchors, and the only friends you have are the ones you work with every day, you are not going to stand out, you are not going to refuse to go along. You are going to do what the others are doing.

Take the case of Jay Darby, the hero from Pennsylvania who first reported the abuse at Abu Ghraib to his superior officer. He slipped an anonymous note under his commanding officer’s door, knowing, in the close environment of the prison, that his identity might well come out at some point. A veteran of Vietnam here in the States said that Darby was nothing but a snitch, and in Vietnam, the veteran said, we made sure snitches didn’t come home again.

Next Steps

In the midst of our difficulties, many have stressed the importance of looking to the future. In general, I agree that it's best to think about what we have to do next. In this case, though, I don't think we can make effective plans until we understand the mistakes we've made. Then we can connect our mistakes to what we should do in the future. That challenging conceptual work will show us how to manage the political problems in Iraq, and how we should coordinate political and military processes. Those are hard questions, and I don't see supporters or opponents of the war in Congress or the administration addressing those kinds of problems.

When one of my correspondents first challenged me to offer a plan better than the one we have now, the best answer I could give was to say that we have to change leadership. Now I've thought about the question a lot more, and my answer hasn't changed: we have to change leadership. I don't see the president or his advisors thinking seriously about what to do here. They're determined to carry on. We have to turn authority over to the Iraqis and to the United Nations, and we're not going to do that under Bush. The supposed transition scheduled for June 30 is a near fraud and everyone knows it. Yes, we'll put a transitional government in place in July, and we'll still try for elections in 2005. But this administration is discredited in the minds of Iraqis and others in the region, and these efforts are going to fail.

Most people still see withdrawal from Iraq as a failure right now. On the contrary, if we could muster the courage and practical vision to withdraw now, that would be success. The problem now is how to manage the process of withdrawal, not how to manage the occupation or how to manage a transition to democracy. No one wants to consider withdrawal now, so the proposal seems weightless and unreal. What seems unreal now, though, will seem necessary as the prospect of a discouraging and even catastrophic outcome in Iraq becomes more apparent.

The United Nations should manage the transition in Iraq. Brahimi, Annan, and countries with credibility in Iraq should take the lead. If that means we lose some access to Iraq's oil down the line, so be it. But no one in public life is saying anything like that – not Kerry, not anyone. Howard Dean was the only one who would say that. Of all the candidates the Democrats fielded, he was the only one who opposed the war with passion from the beginning. I have to say that the primary voters are probably correct that Kerry is more electable than Dean, though you can never tell what sort of campaign a person is going to run. It made me shake my head, though, that in this terrible year abroad that the Democrats came up with a candidate who supported the war.

Now, during a crisis this spring that can bring about a permanent loss of power and stature, Kerry's public relations people are bringing out these news bits that have to do with domestic policy! Who do they think they're talking to?! Yes, politicians have a sense that people are tired of thinking about the war in Iraq, but they have to think about it. Good leaders have to force us to look at what we've done there. We shouldn't be finding out about it from 60 Minutes. Our leaders have to know what's going on there, and our current leaders have proven repeatedly that they do not know what they are doing. They are arrogant and self-righteous, they lack good judgment, and they must lose this election.

So we need to lay out a concrete, practical course of action for the present. The most urgent thing to do is change our leadership. Chamberlain had to go after Munich, and Bush has to go after Iraq. I won't say that Kerry is our Churchill, but he's our only choice. We know that Bush and his advisors won't do anything constructive in this situation. They're going to grant fake sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30, and they're going to keep being dishonest with themselves, which means they aren't going to admit they've made any mistakes. Without that admission, we can't begin to put things right. And if we don't put things right, we'll be amazed at how much worse things can get.

If we were to pull out of Iraq tomorrow, a lot of interesting things would happen there. Not all of them would be good. I expect that by and large, and gradually, things would get better than they are now. We probably wouldn't see a lot of unity among the three regions of the country: the Kurdish north, the Sunni center, and the Shia south. We might see more warfare than we care for, and a lot of developments that look threatening to us. Yes, it could turn into the sort of haven for our enemies that Afghanistan became under the Taliban. On the whole, though, it's hard to see that conditions in Iraq would become much worse than they are now. The Iraqis want their country back. I don't think they're going to turn over any part of it to Al Qaeda, the way the Taliban did in Afghanistan. The Iraqis are too smart to do something like that, and they're too smart to start a civil war, too.

That's kind of a flip way of saying they have too much else to do. If we were to leave there, I think we'd see a lot of interesting politics, equivalent in its way to the ten years or so after the British left their American colonies in the early 1780s. You'd see a lot of conflict, and a nation trying to refashion itself. We went through a cruel civil war before we worked things out, and we'd have to be willing to see Iraq go through something like that, too. But it would make a difference that the Iraqis were building a new state with a legitimate government, without an occupying army and foreign administrators around to interfere.

Well, we're not going to leave tomorrow, so we have to ask what would happen if we leave more slowly. And we have to ask what part the UN will play as we get out of there. More than one observer, from Wesley Clark to a British official with the UN, has said that we need to pay close attention to the political process in Iraq as we try to disengage ourselves from the place. Reagan used to say that we have simple answers to our problems – they just aren’t easy ones. That applies here. Experts like Richard Clarke who care about their work know that our job isn’t easy. They know the chances of failure are pretty good at this point. We have sophisticated analysts out there who know Iraq and who can help us disengage. They serve in the UN and in other posts all over the region. We need their advice.

We are the only country in the world right now that thinks the UN shouldn't play a leading part in the political transition coming up in Iraq. We have given the UN its current advisory role only as a last resort: we couldn't see any other way out of the problems we created for ourselves. The UN is indeed our only way out now – out of our problems and out of the country. If we give real responsibility to the UN and to the Iraqis themselves, now, we could still redeem something from the situation, even if we have to admit our mistakes. I should say, only if we admit our mistakes. Only that admission can redeem our reputation and the Iraqis’ future.

Most importantly, intelligent disengagement means we would have a real opportunity to resume the war we should be fighting. We wouldn't be distracting ourselves with blame, when the truly big mistakes go unpunished and even unnoticed. We have made a horrible mistake here, and somebody has to say so. I don't hear Kerry saying so. Somebody with stature has to say it: this war is wrong, and we have to confess it. Then we have to seek forgiveness, atone if that's possible, and fight again. When we fight again, let's pick the right enemy.

Conclusion

You have to give President Bush and his administration this much credit: they took care to make the case for war, even if they patched their case together from falsehoods, distortions, partial truths, and fear mongering. They tried to persuade American citizens that the war was necessary and good, and to quite an extent they succeeded. They succeeded because, as so many said at the time, September 11 "changed everything." The administration closely tied its justification for war to the September 11 attacks. The connection was explicit, and the logic of war led directly from the fall of the twin towers to the occupation of Baghdad.

Bush maintains that the war against Iraq and the war against Al Qaeda are one, but they are not. The war against Iraq makes the war against Al Qaeda so much more difficult to win. We must focus on the primary enemy, Al Qaeda, with the help of the rest of the world; instead we have focused on a secondary enemy, Iraq, with very little help from anyone.

Will Al Qaeda win this war? It's hard to see how they can, in the short or medium term. A better question is, will they lose it? That one is easier to answer. The war against Iraq makes it much more likely that Al Qaeda will not lose the war. And not losing, from their point of view, is just as good as winning. If they can instill fear, constrain liberty, and foster a sense of helplessness and inefficacy, that is as much success as they can hope for. If they can achieve these things, it doesn't matter so much whether they win, or not lose. It looks the same to them.

Here is a closing thought to stress what a serious battle we are in. Let’s not call our enemies terrorists any more. We think of terrorists the way we used to think of anarchists: bearded, bomb-throwing misfits eager to kill themselves for the cause. Let’s recognize our enemies for who they are: clever, determined, dangerous, resourceful, organized, courageous individuals who are completely sure of what they are doing. These are people who think the Taliban did not go far enough, but they are not crazy maniacs. They want to destroy our civilization, and if we make too many mistakes, over time they will. If we call them what they are, fighters for a totalitarian vision of their faith, we’ll perceive that the harm they want to inflict extends far beyond blowing up buildings. Despite their obnoxious ideology and debased religious faith, and notwithstanding their evil acts, they deserve more of a warrior’s respect than we have been willing to give. Respect them we must if we are to destroy them.