Of course invading Iraq was a terrible blunder. I attend peace demonstrations as I believe peace to be a more enduring power than war. Nevertheless, I’m on the fence as to whether we should go or stay at this point.

In his book, “The Assassin’s Gate”, George Packer quoted a US soldier as saying “I would hate it if we did pull out…That would be very selfish for our country. We done messed it up.” The Bush administration claims that the media coverage of the war is not balanced. He wants more good news. While I understand security issues impede the press, I agree that coverage is not always balanced. What I miss, though, is a serious focus on Iraqi lives since the invasion. You know, the people we came to liberate.

Packer’s book provides this coverage. He talks about the confusion among the Iraqis who cannot understand how the greatest power on earth cannot fix the Iraqi power grid. Many Iraqis believe it is a deliberate act of sabotage on America’s part. They cannot understand that it could be due to, as Packer says “bad planning, halfhearted commitment, ignorance, and incompetence.”

He writes about an Iraqi psychiatrist, Dr. Baher Butti, who is concerned about the mental health of the Iraqi people in general. Dr. Butti wrote “A great number of Iraqi people are suffering a great deal…they have lost the hope in the future…Rebuilding what the war has destroyed is a simple effort if compared with the task of rebuilding the distorted human person.”

I knew Bush mishandled the aftermath of the war, but the level of incompetence Packer details is shocking. There are too many mistakes to enumerate here, but a major one is this; for its Iraqi news outlet, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) hired a company for $82 million which had ties to Rumsfeld but no relevant media experience. While compensating media advisors well, it nickel-and-dimed the network. What it produced was a mix of CPA announcements and Arabic singing, which mimicked TV under Saddam. As a result, most Iraqis turned to al-Jazeera and the Iranian antenna station instead. As Packer said “The CPA squandered [this] early opportunity…to begin the civic education that would be vital for Iraq’s transition to democracy.”

Recently Gen. Wesley Clark spoke on the importance of Democrats gaining control of Congress. Answering a question on Iraq, Clark said this decisive moment was not a military moment, but a political one. He spoke about the need to convince Shiites and Kurds to bring Sunnis into the leadership and to change the constitution to insure Sunnis a share in oil profits and that not doing this meant civil war. Elsewhere, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del) called for Bush to fire Rumsfeld as a message to other world leaders that his course has been mistaken and he was ready to listen, to get their help to pressure the Shiites to reform their ways. It struck me that if either of these men were President, a sane solution to the Iraqi problem would be possible.

Bush’s one remaining justification for invading Iraq is to promote freedom and democracy in the Middle East, yet under his reign our democracy is showing signs of atrophy. He lies about why he went to war, sanctions the outing of a covert CIA agent, and wire taps our phones, yet the Republican controlled Congress refuses to hold him accountable. With so little regard for the true principals of democracy, how can he bring democracy to Iraq?.

Packer claims that Bush looks at Iraq as a personal test of his will. Bush focuses more on his need to stand his ground than the concerns of Iraqis. Indeed Packer claims that many Iraqi security forces feel their perceived purpose is to fight for the United States not Iraq.

In the unlikely chance that Bush tried to follow Biden or Clark’s advice, I doubt he would succeed. His credibility is gone. Even he may know this. It could be why he said future presidents would have to determine when we leave. Democrats might disown this defeat as Bush’s failure, not ours, and be happy to just walk away. But the US bares some responsibility for the current plight of the Iraqis. Ignoring this does not fit well with my sense of Democratic Party values. This is not to mention the fallout within the Middle East of failure in Iraq. The question is not should we go or stay. Obviously we should leave at some point, but it matters what we leave behind and we should not forget this.