The welcome formation of a new unity government notwithstanding, the climate in Iraq remains poisonous. And now, observers lament, there are no more big "unifying events" on the calendar. America's reputation as freedom's champion is taking lumps around the globe, while here at home public support for the war is waning. Arab nations are using the situation in Iraq to push an anti-democratic and anti-American agenda. Terrorists have made the Iraq conflict the Spanish civil war of the war on terror.

I have an idea to help fix all that. Let's let the Iraqi people vote on whether American troops should stay in Iraq.

President Bush has said that if a democratically elected government of Iraq asked us to leave, we would. I think Bush is sincere, but the truth is that no Iraqi government is going to ask U.S. troops to withdraw anytime soon, because American troops are the only thing holding the country together.

The Iraqi people understand this, too. In the town of Talafar, for example, American troops are keeping Iraqi factions from killing each other. Sheik Abdullah Al Yawar, a leading Sunni in the province, recently told The New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan that if U.S. soldiers withdraw, "there will be rivers of blood." The Atlantic Monthly's Robert Kaplan (no relation) recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "My most recent searing, first-hand impression of Iraq, from last December, is this one: one town and village after another getting back on its feet, with residents telling American troops not to leave."...