THE QUESTION Doubts about Iraq
Every month or so, I agonize over the same question.

Was I wrong to support the war in Iraq?

With every new bombing, every new step toward civil war, every show of utter incompetence, I wonder if my stance was the right one, or if I was horribly misguided.

To be clear, I was not a W-come-lately to the idea that WMDs were not the only reason Saddam Hussein's vile regime needed to be wiped from the face of the earth. Let us shed no tears for a government that slaughtered its people with impunity. Let us not miss a state-sponsored death machine that spawned two wars and destabilized a region that holds the future of the world economy in its hands. And let us finally recognize that those who believed Saddam was a rational actor on the world stage were living a dangerous, foolish and naive fantasy.

But none of that can cover for the fact that, so far, the war in Iraq has been an utter, abject and unmitigated failure.

I say that not because I don't believe the average Iraqi life is far better than it was before the war; I believe, from an objective standpoint (which is hard to have when a truck bomb is going off somewhere in your country every day), it likely is. This is not because I have any trouble thinking the world is better off without Saddam in power than with him; it undoubtedly is.

It has more to do with the fact that invading another country automatically transfers certain responsibilities to the occupier: Accountability for keeping the trains running, the water flowing, the oil pumping and the security functioning. None of that has been achieved in Iraq.

We are now engaged in a bloody and violent struggle with few answers and fewer options. At this point, we have no good options.

Those who insist that we can withdraw now are either misguided or selfish. We made this mess; it is our responsibility to clean it up. In reality, the only thing that has kept Iraq from turning into a hellish bloodbath is the knowledge that any true civil war is likely to bring a swift and strong response from the United States and prolong the occupation.

And while our leaving might calm the nationalist insurgency, it will do nothing to halt the Islamist uprising. The Shi'ite leadership is, in the eyes of al Qaeda and Zarqawi, a collection of heretics in the heart of the Islamic world. And the "spectacular" attacks we see, mostly in the form of car or truck bombings, would contine apace. Unlike the nationalist insurgency, the terrorists want a civil war; it is their objective. They will not just give up when we leave, though they will take full credit for it. It is ironic that those who argued that going into Iraq would boost al Qaeda's recruiting efforts now promote a policy that would give bin Laden an even bigger coup: Defeating the United States and becoming the leader of a no longer quixotic world wide jihad.

"Staying the course" will not work. We have stayed the course for three years now, and we have lost more than 2,000 men and women in the dessert as Iraq spirals closer and closer to civil war.

We need a new direction. And it is President Bush's responsibility, and his alone, to get us one. He got us into this forsaken war, and whether he will be in office when it ends or not, what we do in the next few months will determine the future.

The first step is to fire Donald Rumsfeld and every other person largely responsible for the current fiasco. Then bring in a respected group of Republican and Democratic statesmen with experience in this region. Appoint a czar for Iraq policy with ultimate responsibility, accountability and authority over our actions in that nation.

I used to be able to say there was time to get Iraq right. I'm not sure anymore.

But we must try. Or we will have sacrificed the lives of all those men and women for nothing.

And mothers and fathers who weep tears for their children will never have an answer when they ask themselves, "Why?"