What are our options in Iraq?

According to Wretchard, we only have one - to succeed at what we are doing.

In an ironic way, American troops are probably the sole guarantors of Falluja's survival. Many outraged Shi'ites want the place leveled, plowed and then salted. In a land filled with conspiracy theories surely the most bizzarre is the belief that the Americans are in league with Al Qaeda to kill off the Shi'ites simply because they have not incinerated Fallujah. "'If the Americans don't kill the terrorists,'" Abu Yas declared, "'we will think, 100 percent, that the Americans have a relationship with Al Qaeda.'" The theory that the United States could leave the Islamic world alone may be as wishful as the proposition that you can leave a bomb to tick in peace.

He closes with this.

The neoconservative assumption that Middle Eastern societies were transformable has been described as the product of excessive hope when it is really the counsel of despair. It is the remainder which 'however improbable, is all that is left after all the impossibles have been eliminated'. The fact that America, without resorting to mass murder, has kept such a fractious country intact, that many Iraqis daily risk their lives in the effort to beat back this darkness, is testimony to a quality of work which deserves better than the scorn that has been heaped upon it.

In a few weeks many social liberals will feel impelled to vote as Mahatir Mohammed suggests, for entirely different reasons but for the same man nonetheless. Some conservatives have already accepted the idea that the only proper reaction to the "bloody borders of Islam" is to recoil as Ronald Reagan did once upon a time in Beirut, hoping nothing more will follow. But there is nowhere left to run and having learned so much about the problem, nothing really before us but our trepidation.

The Kerry way isn't an option. It's a fatal mistake.