I can't even imagine Iraq anymore. It exceeds my capacity to visualize horror. In a recent interview with The Washington Post's Anthony Shadid, a woman named Fatima put it this way: "One-third of us are dying, one-third of us are fleeing, and one-third of us will be widows." At the Baghdad morgue, they distinguish Shia from Sunnis because the former are beheaded and the latter are killed with power drills. Moqtada Al Sadr has actually grown afraid of his own men. I came of age believing the United States had a mission to stop such evil. And now, not only isn't the United States stopping it--in some important sense, we are its cause.

In a particularly cruel twist, the events of recent months have demolished the best arguments both for staying and for leaving. Once upon a time, you could have plausibly argued that, by staying, the United States might make things better: We could have improved security on the ground and thus enhanced the Iraqi government's authority while weakening the insurgents and the militias. That would have allowed Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish leaders to make the tough political compromises that might have pulled Iraq back from the brink. But, since February's attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra, the violence has grown so shocking--and the sectarian hatred so intense--that asking either the Sunnis or Shia to disarm (no one is even asking the Kurds) is inviting them to commit mass suicide. The Bush administration keeps telling Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki to take on the Shia militias, as if the guy just lacks motivation. But the militias are not a threat to the Iraqi state; they are the Iraqi state...

Once upon a time, you also could have argued that, if the United States left, Iraqis would have little reason to continue the slaughter. "What the resistance movement has been resisting is the occupation," wrote Nir Rosen last December in The Atlantic, making the case for withdrawal. "Who would the insurgents fight if the enemy left?" The question now answers itself. For most Iraqi Sunnis, the primary enemy is no longer the U.S. military; it's their Shia countrymen. Amazingly (given how much they hate our occupation), prominent Sunni leaders now actually want the United States to stay--because we're restraining the government in Baghdad from butchering them wholesale...

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