If casualties go below a certain point, he will decide that this "war" is now something else. On a date certain it will "soon be over," whatever that means. But if McCain thinks that Western troops in the Muslim Arab heartland are not going to be shot at or fought or resented in ways we Westerners do not begin to understand for ever, or if he thinks that they will function as the kind of token symbolic force that exists in Germany or Japan or South Korea, he is - how to put this politely? - out of his mind.

If McCain is going to give us straight talk - one thing the Bush administration has been completely unable to do - and believes that Iraq should remain a permanently integrated part of a new, expanding American protectorate in the Middle East, then he needs to say so. He needs to be honest about what his goal of turning Iraq into a stable, non-despotic, unified country, permanently occupied by US troops, requires. It will require trillions of dollars, a bare minimum of another decade of occupation, over 100,000 troops (probably more) committed indefinitely, and no lee-way to tackle any major security threats anywhere else on the planet including Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, without a draft. Oh, and then there's a need to maintain US public support for the Sisyphean task of nation-building a place where there is no nation, in a place a long way away, where our reward for such an effort will be fathomless contempt and hatred.

McCain says we all want to leave Iraq. But some obviously don't. It is increasingly clear that the point of the surge and the occupation is to stay in Iraq for ever. Do we want that? Is it in the West's interest? Maybe, after all these years, we can have some minimal honesty in this debate. According to Cordesman, no progress is possible without maintaining the same level of troops of the past five years for the next five years. And we have no guarantee that anything will be saner then. That's the decision Americans need to make clearly, candidly, honestly, for the first time in this war. That's what this election is about. Let's put the choice on the table and collectively decide now - for empire or retreat. We won't get an opportunity like this again.

Everything else is either a pious hope or a serious lie.

(Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty.)

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