After the surge

SIX IN 10 AMERICANS now believe that the Iraq war was a mistake, and the latest news offers scant evidence that the surge strategy is turning the tide. With 123 U.S. soldiers killed, May was the bloodiest month since the battle for Fallouja in November 2004. A new survey finds Iraq to be the most violent nation in the world -- worse even than Sudan.

The drumbeat of bad news has become so routine that it is dropping off American front pages. It is agonizing nonetheless: On Tuesday alone, at least 38 Iraqis were killed in separate car bombings, and 51 more corpses were found in the streets of Baghdad and in Diyala province, the new U.S. front in the war against Al Qaeda in Iraq. Over the Memorial Day weekend, insurgents shot down a U.S. helicopter in Diyala. They then fiendishly booby-trapped the site and the road leading there, blowing up six rescuers. And four Iraqi journalists have been gunned down in the last five days. Two of them worked in Kirkuk in northern Iraq, where ethnic tensions are worsening.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, 40 heavily armed guerrillas stormed the Ministry of Finance in broad daylight Tuesday, shouted “Where are the foreigners?” and hauled away five British hostages, who remain missing. There are ample grounds to believe that the kidnapping was an inside job, which suggests that Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s efforts to stop the well-known infiltration of the security services by sectarian insurgents has so far failed.

President Bush’s response was to suggest Wednesday that U.S. troops should remain in Iraq for the long term to provide stability, but not in a combat role -- much as the U.S. has left troops in South Korea since the 1950-53 war. It’s true that many Americans probably wouldn’t object to leaving troops in Iraq if their presence were as peaceful as U.S. deployments to South Korea have been for most of the last 30 years. But the South Korean analogy is false and dangerous because it misreads the very nature of the Iraq conflict. In South Korea, the U.S. propped up a stable (though for a long time dictatorial) government against a fierce external enemy, Chinese-backed North Korea. In Iraq, the problem isn’t external enemies, it’s a weak central government that is seen as illegitimate by segments of the population and whose supporters have become participants in a multifaceted civil war. The U.S. choices are either to back the strongest faction -- the elected but sectarian Shiite-dominated government -- and hope that it ultimately prevails, or to try to foster meaningful political reconciliation that would allow the United States to plan a strategic and orderly disengagement from Iraq.

The latter is by far the wiser course, and there are signs that despite his infelicitous rhetoric, Bush is moving in that direction. The president spoke Wednesday with Maliki and the Sunni and Shiite vice presidents to urge reconciliation, oil-revenue sharing and political reform. Without such progress, no number of U.S. troops can force peace upon Iraq.