As the violence continues and the carnage mounts, the debate over the Iraq war begins to take on a new tone. Republicans are peeling away from the president who got us, and the Iraqis, and the soldiers of the Coalition of the Willing, into this disaster.

So far, it's only a few Republicans, to be sure. But their defection is as significant as the testimony of the retired generals has been.

This war will be over, some day. And the memories of many Americans will fade and blur. Not so, though, with the neocons who persuaded the president and deceived Colin Powell. They, like the militarists who have nursed the myth of the Loss of Vietnam, will remember. And some day, there will be another country in the gun sights of the military-industrial complex. And there will be another madman in office like the current vice president.

The inevitable pullout of our troops from Iraq must not be driven by partisan politics. For the sake of the nation, we need broad-based leadership on the push for a pullout.

And we need it soon.

Clearly, to argue for a pullout is to accept the likelihood that we will leave the Iraqis to face great trauma. The problem is that there is no alternative. Staying simply ramps up the horror. We can not win this war. We never could.

Curiously, the vice president once understood this. In "Vice," their study of Dick Cheney, authors Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein note that Cheney was Secretary of Defense in the administration of Bush Senior, who had his own confrontation with Saddam Hussein.

Neocons today say that the Bush Senior made a mistake, by not invading Iraq and getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Back then, Dubose and Bernstein write, Cheney had a strong retort:

If we had invaded Iraq, Cheney said in a speech following the Gulf War, US soldiers would have had to fight in Baghdad, causing the loss of civilians. And if we had gotten rid of Saddam and his government, "then the question is what do you put in its place?" asked Cheney. "You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq."

Cheney spelled out the challenge of trying to form a stable government in Iraq, given the divisions among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. In addition, he said, the US would likely lose the support of other Arab states.

"And the final point that I think needs to be made," he said, "is this question of casualties. I don't think you could have done all of that without significant additional casualties."

"And the question in my mind," he said, "is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many."

In 2003, we abandoned that attitude. George Bush ordered an invasion of Iraq. And many of the senators who now criticize the war let him do it.

Within a few days, we are to get a progress report on how things are going in Iraq. We'll get another one in September. But the administration is already spinning the message. The latest fix for our problems in Iraq - The Surge - has just begun, Bush spokesperson Tony Snow says. We're "at the starting point now." This week's report is "a look at the starting line," a "snapshot of the beginning of the retooling of the mission in Iraq."

Bush and Cheney apparently hope to keep benchmarking and dissembling until they can slither out of office, leaving this tragedy to the next president.

It will matter, of course, who that president is. John McCain, apparently, would keep the carnage going. The other Republicans? Some, I assume, would be more reasonable. If a Democrat is elected president, she or he will have to find a way to pull out. And will be saddled, and will saddle the Democratic Party for decades to come, with the label of coward.

And so I hope for reason.

In both parties.

Iraq is not a partisan issue. And never has been.

Who's the enemy?

I'm grateful to Clark Hoyt, the New York Times' "public editor," for citing the Bush administration's newest deception about Iraq - and the mainstream media's blithe acceptance of it.

The administration, Hoyt noted on Sunday, now blames "Al Qaeda" for most of the carnage in Iraq, despite the fact that numerous insurgencies are at work, and the group called Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is only a small part of them. And despite the fact that this particular Al Qaeda "didn't even exist until after the American invasion," wrote Hoyt.

The media - and in particular, the Times - were complicit in the selling of the Iraq invasion. Now they're boosting the Bush administration's attempt to scare us into staying with the war, by once again linking 9/11 and Iraq.