EXIT STRATEGY

The Bush administration’s new plan to turn over power and responsibility to the Iraqis by next June offers a way out from an increasingly dangerous mess. The old schedule – several more years of American-led occupation, a long drafting of a constitution, national elections, and finally a hand over of power to an Iraqi government – was obviously failing. The Iraqi people, while most of them are glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein, are increasingly restive under the occupation. U.S. forces and their allies and collaborating Iraqis are increasingly targets for deadly guerrilla warfare.

Substantial U.S. forces must remain in Iraq for some years, but as invited supporters of an independent Iraq rather than as an occupying army. Iraqi police and military units will gradually take over law-and-order functions and eventually the counterinsurgency. Knowing the language, the culture and the territory, they may do better at the latter than the Americans.

A downside of the sharp change in course is that the dream of Mr. Bush and the advisers who had pushed for regime change in Iraq for many years will probably go by the boards. Instead of a peaceful, democratic Iraq as a model for peace and freedom throughout the Middle East, we may well see an Islamic state led by the majority Shiites like Iran. An indefinite struggle for control by the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds seems inevitable. Iraq’s Arab neighbors will be tempted to meddle.

Critics immediately suspected that the new exit strategy serves Mr. Bush’s re-election needs. He can claim victory and begin a pullout with a decent interval before next November’s election. The critics also have long charged that Mr. Bush and groups of neoconservative ideologues, mostly in the Pentagon, brought us into the present straits by using selective intelligence to justify the war. The president and his advisers insisted that Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that posed an imminent threat to American security. By linking Saddam to the Islamic terrorist group Al Qaeda, they persuaded many Americans that he had a hand in the Sept. 11 attacks. Those weapons of mass destruction haven’t been found, and Mr. Bush has acknowledged that Saddam was not part of September 11. Still another criticism is that the invasion has made Iraq a magnet for Islamic terrorists from all over the Arab world.

Those charges are well founded, and Mr. Bush may yet have to answer to them. But they are beside the point now, when the United States must find a humane and just end to the long hard slog. It must try to do so without worsening the plight of the Iraqi people, who have suffered both Saddam’s dictatorship and the American war and occupation.

So Mr. Bush is right in changing course, speeding up the hand over and opening the way for Iraqi rule by the Iraqi people, whatever that may turn out to mean.