The question today is whether by staying in Iraq indefinitely, the United States can reverse – or at least arrest – the damage it has done. The answer is “No.” Will the continued expenditure of American blood and money bring Iraqis better lives and futures? Will the procedures we’re following make the American people more secure? No. As long as U.S. politicians buy into the logic that the United States should stay in Iraq “until the job is done,” whatever that job may be, there will be no improvement in the situation on the ground in Iraq.

There are two basic reasons:

The first lies in the nature of “occupation.” It’s a concept few Americans understand, because the United States as such has never been conquered and occupied. But the hatred that occupation creates is deep and enduring. If you have ever had your house burglarized you know something of the feeling: that sensation of intimate violation created by someone moving through your space, examining, touching, pilfering, rearranging, investigating, and perhaps threatening your life as well as your property. That’s what it feels like to be occupied by a foreign power, except that a burglary takes place in a matter of minutes, an occupation lasts for years, decades, generations. The sense of violation and humiliation continues, accumulates, festers, and explodes.

You will say that the motives of the occupier are what count – but not for those who are occupied. The only part of the United States that ever suffered through the experience was the South after the Civil War. The cause of the North was morally righteous: to preserve the Union and to end slavery. Washington called the occupation by the positive-sounding name of “reconstruction,” and so, eventually, it was. But 142 years later, many Southerners still cherish their resentments. Now imagine if that occupation had been carried out by forces which shared neither the language, nor the culture, nor the faith of those they occupied. Iraqis come from an ancient society with millennial memories, and even when it the occupation is over they will nourish their hatred of the occupiers for many generations to come.

Iran is the second reason that there will be no improvement in the Iraqi situation as long as American politicians are saying they will stay as long as necessary. The mullahs have many more levers to pull in a society that has been penetrated by their culture and faith and population for centuries and their secret services for decades. Iran has no interest in seeing Washington establish long-term bases in Iraq from which it could project not only air power but ground forces across the frontier.

You will note that the United States government is very vague about how long it hopes to hold on to those bases, or how many there will be. (A top American general told me privately the other day, “That’s up for debate. Right now we just don’t know.”) Almost all the strategies that are being discussed publicly involved a reduction in American forces, a shrinking of the U.S. military “footprint,” with withdrawal to various protected installations around the country in order to “support” local Iraqi forces. But that design for the future only gives Iran reason to continue doing what it can – which is a lot – to undermine the entire American presence. One answer to this challenge might be to bomb or indeed to invade Iran. A new war. Potentially a new occupation. With new pathologies.

What is the moral position? Right now we are acting like a surgeon who’s discovered he’s taken out the wrong organs and is hoping to repair that disastrous mistake by taking out still more. The wisest policy would be for the United States to announce a clear timetable for withdrawal of all its military forces from Iraq. If, as the moment approaches, the Iraqi people are desperate for us to stay indefinitely, then let them say so in a referendum. Polls show it’s doubtful that they would do so. Iraq may or may not be able to heal itself, but we cannot do the job for it, and to pretend that we can is not only immoral, it is delusional.