What should we do in Iraq? Nobody knows.

The main argument for staying advanced by the Bush-men seems to be that if we leave now, Iraq will constitute a real and continuing threat to our security. Maybe, but not in the way the Bush-men want us to think it will. The Bush-men want us to believe that if we leave, the country will somehow fall under the control of al Qaeda, or under the control of those who will foster and protect al Qaeda like the Taliban did in Afghanistan. But the notion that Iraq may fall under the control of al Qaeda is a hallucination, nothing more. Zarqawi simply does not have enough men. His hundreds of terrorists are never going to wrest control away from the Shia and Sunni militias, which number in the tens of thousands. Zarqawi may keep up a running skirmish with whoever comes to control Iraq, but then again he may not. It’s one thing to wage a guerrilla offensive against the damn Yankee infidels, but quite another to do it against whoever takes over in Iraq after we leave. But either way, Zarqawi is at best a marginal factor in the future of Iraq, and best left to one side.

Whether Iraq comes to be ruled by the democratic alliance we have struggled so long to create, or by whoever wins the full-fledged civil war that remains a very real possibility, it’s not at all clear that there’s any real threat of Iraq constituting a Taliban-like safe haven for al Qaeda. So it does appear that even today, al Qaeda is the same kind of red herring that it has been in Iraq all along—a button that the Bush-men will keep on trying to push, in the hope that America will be manipulated into supporting the course of action the Bush-men want to adopt.

So is there no good reason for staying in Iraq? I see at least two. First of all, whether or not a full-fledged civil war erupts when we leave, Iraq will remain dangerously unstable. And given how critical peace and stability in the Middle East is to our economy, an unstable Iraq would certainly constitute a real and continuing indirect threat to our national interest. There is also the fact that instability in the region will probably help jihadi and terrorist forces to gain strength over time.

Secondly, there is the argument that at this point we have a moral obligation to the Iraqi people not to leave their country in tatters, not to just walk away and leave them to deal with the impossible mess of shattered infrastructure and lack of resources. Not to mention the total absence of law and order. It is a sadly ironic fact that the average Iraqi feels much less safe today than he did under Saddam. Under Saddam, you may not have been free, but by and large if you didn’t mess with the regime, you were safe. Under Bush, you may be free and get to regularly paint your finger purple, but you live in constant fear for your life (and the lives of your family and friends). No telling when armed and uniformed thugs will burst into your house (or their houses), and take away one or more people at gunpoint, and that’s the last anyone ever sees them alive. And let’s make no mistake—we are solely responsible for bringing about this state of affairs. Things weren’t anywhere close to this when we arrived, and it is entirely our management of the situation which has brought things to this pass. If we leave Iraq now, we leave the country worse than when we found it, much more messed up. That doesn’t sit well with our self-image of America, and it shouldn’t.

At this point, it is certainly tempting to argue that we should stay, more out of moral imperative than self-interest, perhaps.

The trouble, though, is that it is totally unclear whether we can actually achieve anything by staying. Whether we stay one more year or five, it’s not clear what we can do to ensure that Iraq will be more stable when we leave. Those sectarian tension fault lines run too deep, and are fueled by the kind of unreasoning blood-feud hatred that we can neither hope to understand nor reverse. No one is advocating that we stay forever. And no one has a plan or a proposal or a strategy (or whatever the hell Condi Rice wants to call it) for improving the prospects of stability in the future. (When Bush claims or implies that he does, that’s just a crock of the usual stuff.) Similarly, if we haven’t been able to restore the shattered infrastructure in the last three years, it is not at all clear what progress we can realistically hope to make (given the current security situation in Iraq) by staying one more year or five.

It isn’t clear either that we can do anything to shore up the security situation. Nobody knows when, if ever, there will be more than a token number of battalions deemed to be capable of operating independently of American “assistance”. The recent track record of our efforts to train them isn’t exactly reassuring. Either we were playing shell games with classifying battalions as ready to operate independently (and we chickened out later), or we first managed to train three battalions and then somehow succeeded in untraining them. (Maybe that’s what is meant by “too much of a good thing”?)

What is crystal clear is that if we stay in Iraq, a lot more Americans will be killed, a lot more Americans will be maimed, and we’ll pour untold billions of good money after bad. And all in the touchy feely warm fuzzy hope that if only we stay, somehow things will improve at some point.

The Bush-men have been pretty adroit at setting up and pushing the “support the troops even if you no longer support the war” button. They have managed to frame the issue as “what kind of American are you if you don’t even support our troops when they’re over there making the supreme sacrifice for us, for you”? And they managed to deceive America for the longest time into believing that supporting the troops meant supporting the war, or at least not opposing it. That, of course, is not the only way to frame the issue. As Bush might say, some are now framing it as “is it supporting the troops to vote for them to continue to be maimed and killed in some vain and unrealistic hope of accomplishing something by staying on in Iraq”?

John Murtha is convinced that our continued presence in Iraq does nothing to help achieve our objectives, and that an immediate withdrawal will help more than it will hurt. I don’t know about that. What I do know is that John Murtha is an honorable man, that he has spent a lot longer thinking about this and agonizing over it than I have or could ever hope to, that he has a lot more experience and expertise to bring to bear on the subject, that he has no axe to grind other than the welfare of our soldiers and the protection of this country, and that he has more intimate knowledge of the ground realities in Iraq than not just me but also a lot of the people who are attempting to formulate the administration’s Iraq war strategy. Many of these people have much less experience and expertise than Murtha, they have personal axes to grind (either supporting the administration’s past positions or protecting their careers from premature disintegration, or both) and they have repeatedly revealed themselves not to be honorable men.

I don’t know why, but somehow I trust Murtha on this a lot more than I trust Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Condi-Pace and the rest of the usual gang of suspects. If you ask me what I think we should do in Iraq, I would have to answer “I don’t know, and I won’t pretend to!” If you ask me what I would vote for if I had to vote today, I wouldn’t refuse to vote, though. I’d vote for Murtha’s plan. And under my breath, I’d murmur a quick “God Save America!”