We removed a terrible dictator from power, verified that there are no weapons of mass destruction, and guaranteed that no one will build them there soon. But Bush has expanded our aims to include creating "a peaceful country."

Unfortunately, our efforts to impose good governance change the incentives of Iraqi political leaders, prolonging internecine violence.

The administration, prominent Democrats, and think tank analysts have each offered their own ideas to promote peace in Iraq. The administration promises to seize the initiative with aggressive patrols and hard counter-attacks against militants. Many Democrats want to increase the number of occupying troops, using American or international forces. Independent analysts prefer to manipulate Iraqi groups like old European empires "divided and conquered." None of these strategies addresses the underlying cause of violence - only the withdrawal of American troops will do that.

Hitting insurgents hard appeals to the administration, because in their view only a few hardcore fighters oppose us. Eventually, officials hope, we may kill all of them. However, our patrols and attacks miss their targets much more often than they hit them, even when our intelligence is of the best quality. The tactical situation is very fluid, and we don't always know who we're looking for. As we strike harder, our misses cause more collateral damage, so they serve as advertising for anti-American groups' recruitment drives.

Iron fist tactics also violate American values. If the administration is correct that our opponents in Iraq are criminal gangs, then an aggressive military campaign there should look like our quest to destroy the Medellin drug cartel in Colombia. At the end of a long struggle in which thousands of policemen, civilians, and drug thugs were murdered, America's Colombian friends killed Pablo Escobar. To pull this off, we allied ourselves with the odious Cali cartel, supported murderous death squads, and circumvented Colombia's governing institutions.
The proposal to expand the occupation force is no better. Advocates think that each soldier can interact with small groups of civilians, gathering information and protecting the innocent. Such close ties might sway the locals to our side. But the United States is already running out of soldiers, both active duty and reserves, even at current deployment levels.

Proposals to expand the American military by a few divisions cannot cure the shortfall. Historical experiences in post-World War II Europe, the Balkans, and Northern Ireland suggest we should deploy many thousands more soldiers in Iraq, each backed by two more at home, preparing or recovering. While a few more Americans could be persuaded to join the occupation force by offering higher pay, the only way to run a sustained occupation is with conscripts. And no one should seriously want to go back to a low-morale, less-professional American military.

The Democratic presidential contenders hope to solve this problem with multilateral forces. On the one hand, they imagine that other countries have significant, untapped reservoirs of soldiers. On the other, they believe that Iraqis would truly view international forces as liberators rather than occupiers. Like many liberal internationalists, these Democrats believe that misunderstanding causes conflict; specifically in Iraq, they trace the violence to locals' misinterpretation of America's goals - the belief that we want to exploit Iraq's oil.

The truth, though, is that the other rich countries have enjoyed a free ride on American defense spending, and their under-funded militaries have few troops to offer. With many soldiers already deployed in the Balkans, Europe has none to spare. French diplomatic intransigence is really just cover for military incapacity.

Moreover, it is naÔve to believe that Iraqis will be happier fearing exploitation by a U.N.-blessed coalition instead of an American-led one. The most powerful force in modern politics is the desire for local control. To an Iraqi, one international conspiracy is as perfidious as another.

Iraqis also fear domestic conspiracies as much as international ones. Control of the future Iraqi government is up for grabs. Saddam's thugs used to be strong enough to keep others down, but since the war, no group is strong enough to impose its rule on the others. American news stories routinely report conflict between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. Underlying that tension, myriad sub-factions now vie for control ñ the key source of instability in Iraq. The questions are whether that competition will be violent and whether the U.S. will be blamed for the fighting.

Optimistic American analysts hope that we can pursue a deft balance of power strategy; some even think that we should allow Iraq to collapse into three autonomous provinces (Kurd, Shiite, and Sunni) that could balance each other's power. But which Kurd, Shiite, and Sunni groups would rule? And if the U.S. hoped to maintain overall control, would we be able to manipulate the locals, or would they manipulate us? Americans would probably be tricked into doing locals' "dirty work." In Afghanistan, warlords have convinced Americans to attack rivals by calling them "Taliban sympathizers," even in cases where the rivals were actually American allies.

Local groups that are roughly the same size cannot permanently defeat each other. With a superpower around, they nonetheless keep fighting because they can hope to win with the foreigners' aid.

Without occupying forces, a balance of power could emerge among the main Iraqi factions. Stronger factions would cooperate because they could not win by battling in the streets, while weaker groups would accommodate them. But as long as American soldiers with heavy firepower stay in Iraq, local groups will fight against their rivals ñ either using their own militias or American proxies.

After crushing the old Iraqi order, the U.S. has no way to create a new one without an ugly transition. For the Iraqis, we should make that transition as short as possible. More important, we should prevent the transition from killing Americans, undermining our values, and breeding terrorist threats. The best answer is to withdraw American military forces from Iraq. Immediately.

Eugene Gholz is an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky's Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce and a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy.