President Bush should take advice from a Vietnam-era Republican senator: Declare a victory in Iraq and get out.

The late Sen. George Aiken, R-Vt., gave that counsel to Presidents Johnson and Nixon when things were going from bad to worse in the Vietnam War, but they ignored him.

Both presidents would have looked better in the history books had they listened to the venerable senator. But, alas, neither wanted to be seen as retreating or losing a war.

I know this is a popular opinion on the left, but I disagree, for reasons I hope to make clear at some point -- but, for one thing, Vietnam was a war of liberation/civil war into which we poked our noses and gradually ended up taking over wholesale. We did not, however, fundamentally create the situation there, although we aggravated it and took it to new heights of destruction. Pulling out was an option there because (as we've seen, historically), doing so simply knocked the props out from underneath a puppet regime. It did not leave behind utter chaos and a complete power vacuum, which is exactly what would happen if we pulled out from Iraq. We are the cause of the chaos and near-anarchy in Iraq, and, as unpleasant as it is to consider, because of that we have an obligation to not simply "declare victory and leave" without first at least stabilizing things and turning over the basics of a viable country to the Iraqis.

I certainly don't advocate that we continue on as we've been doing, and I don't want to be in the position of having to support the efforts of the Bush administration, but by deposing Saddam Hussein, disbanding the army and tearing apart the infrastructure of the country, and without sufficient forces to provide security and basic civil services in the aftermath, we took on a moral obligation to the inhabitants of Iraq which will certainly not be serviced by just pulling out.