Tomorrow, Tomorrow - There is no better way to support those fighting in Iraq than to guarantee that no more of them die.

Tomorrow, Tomorrow - There is no better way to support those fighting in Iraq than to guarantee that no more of them die in the service of political miscalculation.
By Anna Quindlen
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.


Feb. 19, 2007 issue - Tomorrow. That's when the United States should begin to bring combat forces home from Iraq. Today would be a better option, but already it's tomorrow in Baghdad, in the Green Zone fortress Americans have built in the center of the city, out in the streets where IEDs are lying in wait for passing soldiers and every marketplace may be the endgame for a suicide bomber.

The course of this war has been a consistent scene of carnage with ever-changing underpinnings. Uncover weapons of mass destruction, lay hands on Saddam Hussein, oversee elections, teach the Iraqis to police themselves. Bring stability to the region. The last has been an illusion. Over the last year many Americans have finally realized how thoroughly they were sold a bill of goods. The picture of the peaceable kingdom painted by the Bush administration nearly four years ago was that of a country, riven by religious and ethnic violence for centuries, suddenly turned into the equivalent of a Connecticut suburb: town meetings, friendly neighbors, a common purpose, perhaps a shopping mall.

Nearly four years of photographs and footage of dusty corpses, cinderblock barriers, shredded cars and bereaved families, and the absurdity of that view is absolute.

No one tries to sell that snake oil anymore. Now the party line is that American forces will get out, but they cannot get out now. They cannot get out now because Iraq would become a place of civil war, of untrammeled violence, of complete chaos.

Iraq has been a place of civil war, untrammeled violence, complete chaos for a long time now. American intervention has not made that better. It has made it worse.

Get out now. Provide plenty of consultants to organize police forces and help with reconstruction. Persuade the Iraqi government, such as it is, to ask for peacekeeping assistance from other nations. Put the arm on allies in the Middle East to participate for the sake of stability in the region. Recognize that much of this is about access to oil, and negotiate accordingly while trying to persuade Americans to go to rehab for their fossil-fuel addiction.

The most tangible pact America made with the Iraqi people was to capture Saddam Hussein and bring him to justice. Done. The most nonsensical and paternalistic one was to bring freedom to the Iraqi people. That they must do themselves.

This is not rocket science. Since the war began there has been an entire shelf of good books written describing the conditions that doomed a military incursion. Each has documented the history of occupation that scarred the Iraqi soul and that American leaders ignored, the powerful insurgencies that somehow came as a surprise to the United States.

America finds itself back where it began, before more than 3,000 U.S. soldiers died, before hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed or maimed. When George W. Bush was bound and determined to send troops to Baghdad, most of his European allies counseled more diplomacy, more attempts to shape Iraq from the outside, more involvement from other Arab nations. The answer to the mess the administration has made since then is to go back. It should go back to the solutions it rejected in favor of international chest thumping, chest thumping that has now cost thousands of American families their sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, and has cost the people who engineered that plan nothing in terms of personal loss.

This month journalism lost one of its most honest and strong-minded practitioners, the opinion columnist Molly Ivins. Breast cancer finally did what her detractors couldn't, wore her down and shut her up. But even as she was fading fast, she felt compelled to dictate a column about the president's plan to shore up a disaster with a mistake by sending more troops to Iraq. She did not call for George W. Bush, whom she had nicknamed "Shrub," to change course. She did not plead with the Senate, whose craven bickering last week as soldiers continued to die on their watch would have surprised her not at all. She always understood the pointlessness of counting on legislative bodies for smarts and sense. She called on those she trusted, the American people. Her dying declaration in print was this: "We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war."

The people who brought America reports of WMDs when none existed, and the slogan "Mission Accomplished" when it was not nor likely to be, now say that American troops cannot leave. Not yet. Not soon. Not on a timetable. Judge the truth of that conclusion by the truth of their past statements. They say that talk of withdrawal shows a lack of support for the troops. There is no better way to support those who have fought valiantly in Iraq than to guarantee that not one more of them dies in the service of the political miscalculation of their leaders. Not one more soldier. Not one more grave. Not one more day. Bring them home tomorrow.