No excuses.(rebuilding Iraq)

OVER the last two years, the U.S. has done nearly everything it thought might undermine the insurgency in Iraq and stabilize the country. We held elections that demonstrated the desire of most Iraqis for a better future. We brought Sunnis into the legitimate political process and fostered the creation of a unity government. We killed the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Zarqawi. We built an Iraqi army that, for all its flaws, will stand and fight. We pushed aside the ineffectual prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari to make room for his replacement, Nouri al-Maliki. We did all of this, yet the violence is as bad as it has ever been.

Attacks on American troops are up. Attacks on Iraqi forces are up. Attacks on Iraqi civilians are up. Iraqi civil society gives the impression of teetering on the edge of collapse. People are afraid to go to mosques, for fear of the horrors that regularly transpire at them. Bank officials depend on stealthy deliveries of cash in private cars, for fear of the brazen robberies that regularly befall armored vehicles. People hesitate to open their doors to the police, for fear that they might actually be militiamen prowling the streets with power tools to torture their victims. Mourners can't even collect corpses at the Baghdad mosque free of fear that they will be killed while doing so. The middle class is fleeing the country, and both Shia and Sunni are beginning to leave mixed neighborhoods to escape sectarian violence.

As all the contributors to the Iraq symposium on page 26 agree, this constitutes losing the war. But the crisis on the ground is not obviously accompanied by a sense of crisis in the Bush administration, even though the war risks sinking Bush's presidency and making his "new Middle East" even worse than the old one.

If the administration is letting domestic political considerations restrain its response in Iraq, it is making a serious miscalculation. GOP officials know how important an energized conservative base is to their hopes this fall. That base would be energized by seeing Bush do more rather than less in Iraq. As far as the rest of the public is concerned, the Bush administration only discredits itself by not fully acknowledging the direness of conditions on the ground. We suspect that if Bush reacted to those conditions with a big new push--and even sent more troops--the public would respond favorably. What is behind its sagging support for the war is the understandable perception that the administration has no path to victory in Iraq, and that we are on an inevitable slide toward calamity there.

Securing Baghdad would provide a demonstrable success to reassure the American public, and would help change the dynamics of the war. Unless checked, the sectarian violence might take on a life of its own. And as long as it rages, it continues to radicalize Shia politics, marginalizing moderating figures like Ayatollah Sistani and empowering firebrands like ...