Iraq : Can we just leave? No.

The living room floor of my wife’s parents historic home, once vacuumed and pristine, is now very often a chaotic mess.

Soccer balls, video games and ancient action figures. A hodgepodge uniquely representative of my mother-in-law’s powerful ability to keep the best of earlier generations and the combine it with the worthiest content of my own...but a chaotic mess nonetheless. As a result, even though I was personally happy to see the soccer ball in among the mess, I go on a little manhunt.

I find the little man upstairs and reiterate one of life’s clearest truths: you don’t make a mess and walk away from it; you stay and clean up the mess.

For my son - not unlike his government - the discussion seems to center around first acknowledging and internalizing the truth of the mess; I come to terms with the fact that he may not define the floor downstairs as "a mess." He comes to terms with the fact that he (and his sister, learning from his every move and decision) is not the only consideration; that there are all kinds of other people to think about.

For the Bush and Blair administrations, and for the citizens ostensibly represented by their decisions and actions, the prolonged misadventure and accompanying unpleasantness in Iraq, is, without doubt, a mess.

But not a mess from which we can just walk away, a sentiment many progressive compatriots have advocated. No, there’s no doubt in my mind that the United States cannot just leave Iraq in the murderous mess we’ve participated, created, and set into motion.

For me the question is not "Should we stay?" Of course we should stay. The question is "What does that mean?" How should we stay? What should our remaining in Iraq look like, signify and accomplish?

First, while we should stay, we cannot lead. Both the US and UK dissolved their moral credibility to lead when, upon the dissipation of the so-called "WMD argument" (and any other prior argument - despite the best efforts of what can only be called a mostly absent and mostly pliant mainstream media to affirm, without investigation, such claims), both Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair began to submit along the lines of "Well, reasonable people can disagree about how we got into Iraq, but no one can say the world isn’t better off with Saddam out of power."

The moral problem with this approach and the leadership problem that emerges, especially for men and administrations that claim to author moral leadership, is that the above paraphrase of the two men who produced this mess is in fact ends-justifies-the-means thinking. The end - Saddam out of power - justifies the means: deception and incompetence on the reasons governments supposedly representative of their citizens in ways democratic started an unprovoked war.

The problem with that?

One, this reasoning is in fact the same reasoning that terror-mongers use. The ends - an Islamic Caliphate or the destruction of an "illegal Israel " or an "immoral West" - justify the means: the killing and harming of all kinds of constituents with any relationship to the ends, be it an innocent one, or not.

Two, for democracies - or even representative systems claiming democratic sensibilities and heritage, like the US and UK - the means have to matter. Means are the primary things that differentiate such governments and their citizens from systems of terror, be they centralized and praxis-reaching, like the USSR under Stalin and Nazi Germany, or diffuse and fundamentalist, like the current various Islamists who work toward terror.

Sickeningly, we find Bush and Blair - and, as a result of our systems of governance, ourselves, because they represent us - alongside Bin Laden and al-Zarqawi in terms of that ends-justifies-the-means thinking. That means, quite simply, that there are one or several flaws in the moral reasoning that has led us to manifest this murderous mess in Iraq. When we find ourselves emerging from the same justification framework as our enemy in the "War on Terror," we’d best re-examine our place in, and support for, such a "war." Especially when it results in the murderous mess we made happen in Iraq .

So we can’t leave. But we can’t lead, either. As hard as it is for US and UK citizens to hear it, we lack the moral credibility in this sad set of circumstances to lead anyone on this issue. We must humble ourselves (not the false humility found in the pseudo-apology we got from that mostly absent and mostly pliant media on their failed Iraq investigative coverage - I’m talking authentic, Shakespearean humbling, post- hubris), and admit to the world community that we made a series of horrible errors, produced a mess, and need some help in cleaning it up, in the right way. That, and only that, is the single way to regain credibility on this matter.

We cannot leave Iraq, but we cannot loot Iraq , either. The process of acknowledging the mess we’ve made, of really beginning the process of cleaning it up, includes not only looking at Halliburton and at Bechtel (and at companies our mostly absent and mostly pliant media doesn’t investigate, like Aegis, BearingPoint, BKSH & Associates, CACI and Titan, Qualcomm, Loral Satellite, Custer Battles - what a name! - and others), but looking at how they got to where they are in Iraq, and saying what we know to be the undeniable and inescapable truth about them to them:

You are war profiteers, making money off of the murderous mess we’ve set into motion. It’s sick, and it’s got to stop. Now.

The only way to reflect America in best practice today is to truly internationalize the rebuilding of Iraq , remove US and UK companies, and set a sooner-rather-than-later timeline to ensure that Iraqi businesses that are Iraqi-based and wholly Iraqi-owned are launched, developed and empowered to complete the rebuilding in ways that Iraqis see fit. We can’t leave, but the nature of our staying cannot be for profit. It must be for authentic assistance to others, for others, that reflects a public admittance of the humbling truth that we’ve mistakenly set this mess into motion.

We can’t leave, but we can’t leverage this mess either. The Bush and Blair Administrations, employing the mess in Iraq in ways that allow them to tie complex and disparate Muslim groups, aims and intents together in the easily-packaged (and easily endorsed by our mostly absent and mostly pliant media) "War on Terror," have used this mess they’ve created in the names of their citizens in Iraq as a tool to foist upon the international community some creatures that emerge from their mold, who promote the flawed morality and sad sickness of ends-justifies-the-means thinking.

From Ann Veneman, corporate creature of Big Business Agriculture, becoming head of UNICEF (implementing failed "No Child Left Behind" thinking on children around the globe), to Paul Wolfowitz fulfilling John Perkins’ "Economic Hitman" approach to banking, debt and exploitation at the World Bank, to John Bolton violating the very hope, spirit and intent of the United Nations by his presence - all these appointments - from both process and personality standpoints - spring from a silent consensus and an open affirmation of the leverage ceded the US in terms of its muscular, murderous and messy response to the "War on Terror." We lack the moral framework, the non-profiteering framework, to be empowered thus.

The lessons my son and daughter are internalizing after 200 messes made on the floor are the lesson citizens must demand be internalized and reflected in nations claiming the democratic tradition for 200 or more years. Can we just up and leave Iraq? Of course not. The question is, having committed to stay, what is the nature of that remaining? Is it to profit? To leverage the wages of such failed morality against fear and terror?

Or is it to authentically and effectively clean up the mess we’ve made, while reflecting America and Britain in best practice, demonstrative of our best traditions?

My kids seem to know the answer, even if they don’t reflect that knowing all the time; I find it hard to believe that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair - along with that mostly absent and mostly pliant media - do not.