“I am in blood step’t in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

From Macbeth, Act III, Scene IV

I watched the last breath leave a man the other night and thought in the hours afterward how I hate the war in Iraq so much it is as though I have watched the last breath leave every one of the 3,613 American soldiers who have died there. Despite that, I support our continued presence in Iraq, and believe we have to stay there until we and the Iraqi people somehow bring that land a measure of peace.

My support of our presence there is a painful and personal struggle. I feel the impending death of the next soldier every day as though one of my own was serving in Iraq. I believe we will look back on our invasion of Iraq as one of the stupidest things America has ever done. My position will put me at odds with many friends and most of my family and stands me with a president whose management of the war has been one of the most incompetent jobs ever done by an American president.

It stands me with President Bush despite what I believe are his spurious arguments for the war, because I don’t buy the idea that we must fight al-Qaida in Iraq or we will fight them on Main Street, or that we are defending freedom or fighting the war on Islamic extremism there. I would rather stand on broken glass than stand with this president on this issue, but there I am.

And there we are and there we should stay, because we smashed it and now we own it with the Iraqi people. We jointly own every broken body and broken heart, every bomb and every bullet, every drop of misery flowing into the river of grief that has become Iraq, and are stuck with them in an embrace of death and misery and hope. For me it is a simple matter of honor and obligation; we set the place on fire, and we cannot walk away while it burns.

The only thing worse now than being there, and the main reason for us to stay, is the civil and regional war I believe will ensue if we leave precipitously. On this point I think Sen. John McCain is right: A bloodbath of far greater proportions than any we have yet seen in Iraq may take place if we leave now. Such a bloodbath could kill a million Iraqis and stain our history and consciences for years to come. The oceans between us and Iraq will not keep us clean of such blood; television and the magnitude of the misery will bring it home, and we will carry the shame of it for generations.

We can argue endlessly about whether such mayhem on a much larger scale will result if we leave, but how can we even accept a real chance that others will suffer this catastrophic bad luck when we broke this mirror in the first place? What right do we have to leave when we are the only power there with the might necessary to prevent a wider civil war? If we believe no such thing will happen and then leave, and Iraq is then consumed in a civil war that kills hundreds of thousands or even millions, are we going back in to stop the massacres? Not a chance, so stuck we are and stuck we should be until there is some stable framework for relative peace in Iraq. We owe it to these people to help fix what we broke and to protect them from the consequences of our decision.

Part of our problem with Iraq is that our leaders were fools about the timeline going in and we are being foolish about the timeline coming out, leaving us with unrealistic expectations that were always impossible to meet. President Bush and his Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld thought we would be in and out of Iraq in six weeks; the truth is we will be lucky if we are out in two decades.

We want the Iraqis to build a country in five years when it took us 70 years (1770s to 1865) for Americans to stop killing each other over control of government and another 100 years after the American Civil War for some members of our equivalent of majority Shiites (white Americans) to stop murdering some members of our equivalent of minority Sunnis (African Americans) who wanted a share of power. Iraq may have looked like a fast food war going in, but there is no drive-through in a war of this kind.

Many reading this column will wonder why I feel qualified as a physician to write about whether we should leave Iraq. I don’t. My qualifications are the same as yours, meaning none but the fact we are voting-age Americans. That compels us to make judgments about the American presence in Iraq whether we feel qualified to make them or not, because we are going to be asked to vote for political candidates whose campaigns will largely revolve around their positions on our involvement in the Iraq war.

Maine voters, for example, will determine the outcome of one of the most important U.S. Senate campaigns in the country in November 2008 between anti-war Democratic Rep. Tom Allen and previous war supporter Republican Sen. Susan Collins. That campaign will turn on the question of the American presence in Iraq, our votes and our judgments.

We may curse those who have put us in the position of having to do so and I do, but we must each make up our minds now about whether we stay in Iraq for the long haul it will take. Good luck, and may your God grant you the wisdom and strength necessary to decide the future of so many souls.

Erik Steele, D.O., a physician in Bangor, is chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.