The Last Iraqi Insurgency

The Neo-con View

The lessons of empire are not the kind of lessons Americans like to learn. It's more comforting to go on denying that America is in the empire business. But the time has come to get real. Iraqis themselves will be the biggest losers if the United States cuts and runs. Fear of the wrong quagmire could consign them to a terrible hell.

A more nuanced view

No sooner do we tune out the mutilated bodies of the four Fallujah contractors than we see a blood-free but equally horrifying image — a marine, in Ramadi, with a buddy's body bag slung over his shoulder. Or the scared faces of hostages. Or the angry ravings of a mob. What we don't see, oddly enough, are those 25 million Iraqis who, we keep being told, are so grateful to the Americans for liberating them from Saddam.

"Once liberators turn into pacifiers, they've lost," Mr. Holbrooke said last week when we talked about "Lawrence of Arabia." Or, as Juan R. Cole, a professor of history and Iraq specialist at the University of Michigan, has said, "A hated occupier is powerless even with all the firepower in the world." Since we cannot cut and run and since we don't have any idea who should get the keys, it's clear that we, like the British before us, are in occupancy in Iraq for the long haul, no matter who officially has "sovereignty" 74 days from now. This is "Lawrence of Arabia," the sequel, and you can be certain it will play on every channel.