Getting Out of Iraq

George Bush is just about the only person in Washington these days who doesn't know that the United States has lost the war in Iraq. "We're never going to back down, we're never going to give in, we'll never accept anything less than total victory," Bush declared in mid-October.

But in the rest of Washington, including the Pentagon, nearly everyone else is thinking about exit strategies. Public support for the war has fallen to an all-time low. Top U.S. generals in Iraq are telling anyone who'll listen that the war has no military solution and are quietly floating ideas to shrink the American occupation. Sen. John Kerry, who spent all of last year waffling on Iraq, now calls for the immediate withdrawal of 20,000 troops and says "our military presence in vast and visible numbers has become part of the problem, not the solution." More than sixty members of Congress have joined the Out of Iraq Caucus, and Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska, charges that the United States is bogged down in Iraq and needs to "start figuring out how we get out of there."

The dilemma now facing the United States is not how to win the war in Iraq but how to end it. The disastrous occupation has left Iraq teetering on the brink of all-out civil war. The country's new constitution has succeeded only in solidifying ethnic and sectarian rivalries. The anti-U.S. insurgency is growing, and some cities along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have been transformed into training grounds for Al Qaeda-style terrorists. And the conflict in Iraq threatens to spill over its borders, drawing Iran, Turkey and the Arab world into a bloody regional conflict.