Our government’s leadership must recognize that our presence in Iraq is part of the problem.

It is clear that the Iraq war is illegal, unwarranted, and born of deceit and ideology. The occupation is a model of ignorance, arrogance, delusion, and incompetence. It’s hubris rampant.

The greater tragedy has followed from the indifference of the war’s authors – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the neocon ideologues, a supine Congress, and a compliant media – to the waste of hundreds of thousands of human lives, their brief mortal spans abbreviated or now occupying maimed or shattered bodies. The innocent always pay the price of empire.

Reckoning day has come. Our brazen imposition of a political and economic structure on Iraq to serve multi-national corporate exploitation, ignorance of the place, and misconduct have cost us Iraqi trust and fueled the insurgency. Violence, primarily directed at us and all who cooperate with us, is worsening and appears inexhaustible. With no experience of democratic compromise, civil war now looms. The light at the end of the tunnel is years off.

The stink of failure is everywhere. We are not safer. The threat of terror increases. We will not control Iraqi oil. We have not created a stable state, much less a democracy. We have only compounded Saddam Hussein’s cruelty and violence.

The elections were to be the turning point. Later, as if James Baker had ridden Hi Ho Silver to the rescue, the insurgency offered to stand down for assurance of U.S. departure within two years. Ideology and arrogance said no.

The fracture of an artificial country, held together only by force, is now inescapable. The Kurds have essentially decamped, established a government. Sunnis and Shiites are rejecting union – and us – by overwhelming percentages. Our leaving could not have more dire consequences than the present violence. Staying will cost a million a day since Moses. That’s 2,737 years.

The solution is to recognize that we are part of the problem. We should quietly ask the Iraq government to invite us to leave in 60 days. In the interim, if invited, we could facilitate the moves toward autonomous regions allowed in the Iraq constitution. Then go.

Many not in the line of fire would cry that betray those who gave their lives, but they were betrayed before they left these shores, sent off to a war that had nothing to do with fighting terror or defending us.

Tragically for those yet to die needlessly, we will not leave. Cheney is caught in arrogant delusion. Nothing in Bush’s life has prepared him for admitting failure. He won’t.

So it is left to us to stop the war ourselves – on the streets, on the Internet, wherever we can slip through the fog of corporate media. It is for us to defeat incumbents in Congress who approved and support the war. Defeat them and if Bush still refuses to go, defund the war. If he still tries to continue it, impeach him.

Congress is the key. It has long been infected with a readiness to do violence against people not too much like us without bothering about whether we could justify the violence: Vietnam, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq for 15 years now. And to not bother at all about myriad casualties and their mourning kin. Ninety-eight percent of Congress blessed Israel’s assault on Lebanon, indifferent to the barbaric wasting of Lebanon and of civilian life to come.

Once out of Iraq, we should unite in insisting upon national recognition that, as Howard Zinn points out, “War is the enemy of the human race.”

We should create a Department of Peace and learn anew how to live cooperatively rather than rush to arms, Rambos all, at the first war cry.

Bill Slavick is coordinator of Pax Christi Maine and an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate.