EDITORIAL
Iraq, one year later: We're in this together

One year ago today, the United States and its "coalition of the willing" invaded Iraq. Troops worried, unnecessarily as it turns out, about encountering chemical or biological weapons or bloody door-to-door combat in Iraqi cities.

As expected, the American military, from high-tech weaponry to boots on the ground, performed brilliantly in the race to Baghdad.

Other expectations required revision: Entire Iraqi divisions didn't line up to surrender, instead melting away, some to fight another day. Advancing liberators were rarely welcomed with flowers. A few ecstatic days of toppling Saddam statuary turned to ugly weeks of looting.

Indeed, Americans were not led to expect this to take a whole year.

The first American occupation administrator predicted his job would be done in 90 days. In a lot less than 90 days, that administrator had been sent home, and more Americans had died in the occupation than had died in the invasion.

The number of American combat deaths over the course of the year is at least 565. Of course, that doesn't count the far larger toll of Iraqis, military and civilian, killed in the invasion and since. The latest development is the discovery by guerrillas that foreign civilian aid workers now present easy targets.

Uncounted thousands have sustained permanently disfiguring or debilitating injury. But that's war.

The second U.S. administrator, Paul Bremer, has set a target date of June 30 to hand over control to an interim Iraqi government. But no one imagines peace will be restored by then, or that American troops will depart in any significant numbers any time soon.

The end of the first year of war in Iraq brings Americans to a peculiar place where a meeting of minds is possible.

Many Americans who opposed the war can agree that we must now make the best of a bad situation, like it or not. To pull out of Iraq now, with conditions there in some ways even worse than before the war, is unthinkable.

Americans who lobbied for the war, on the other hand, must recognize that the Bush administration's distaste for "nation building" must now be overcome.

President Bush has spoken of establishment of a model democracy in Iraq, one that spreads irrepressibly through the Middle East.

We may disagree profoundly on the immediacy of the threat to America presented by Saddam Hussein before the war, but few would say Iraq isn't better off with him gone.

Bush has much to answer for in the way he promoted this war, including the way intelligence may have been misused.

But America can't bog down now in finger-pointing. This anniversary of the invasion is the right time for the nation to come together in commitment to the huge, painful and expensive — but essential — job that remains for us in Iraq.