Forget failure, let's avoid catastrophe.

• Author: Choharis, Peter Charles

IF "SUCCESS" in Iraq means that the war's benefits outweigh the sacrifice of the American and Iraqi people, then it is no longer possible even to conceive of success in Iraq, let alone achieve it.

More than 22,000 Americans have died or been wounded, and the financial cost has passed $300 billion. Iraqi civilians are being slaughtered by the thousands each month--often by sadistic death squads that torture their victims first--while thousands more are being driven from their homes. Billions of dollars remain unaccounted for, even as such basics as fuel, clean water and electricity remain in short supply. Regionally, American influence is at its nadir; while our ability to meet other global interests--including waging war against terrorism--is also at a low.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Before the war started, the Bush Administration fostered inflated expectations about what victory would bring. America would create a stable and unified Iraq with a representative, constitutional government that respected ethnic, religious and women's rights, which could repel foreign terrorists as well as interference from neighboring countries, and which would enjoy a growing, independent, free-market economy.

Three and one-half years after the American invasion, Iraq is none of these. Despite elections, the government has little power to stop the sectarian violence, end the insurgency or protect its borders. Corruption is rampant, the economy depends on huge American subsidies and fundamental political questions remain unresolved.

Nonetheless, despite the Bush Administration's failure to create a peaceful and prosperous Iraq, we cannot simply walk away and thereby expose ourselves to new threats throughout the world. The challenge going forward for U.S. policy-makers, then, is to salvage Iraq in a way that will enable us to protect our regional and global security interests--even as political support for the war continues to decline and our military continues to suffer.

The question on the table should be: What can the United States hope to achieve within a time frame and at a cost that is acceptable to both Americans and Iraqis?

Chasing objective measures of improvement--like electricity production, hospital construction and fuel prices--will never lead to success, since these can be shattered by a single IED. In order to achieve lasting progress, Iraq's political process must be made to work. To prove to the Iraqi people that their elected...