Iraq War: No good options?

The PBS Newshour for 04/07/04 featured among its guests John Mearsheimer, director of the University of Chicago's program on international security policy, as one of his guests.  At one point, he had this exchange with Jim Lehrer:

JIM LEHRER: But a hopeless situation still has... somebody's got to do something. So somewhere in there, do you see a combination of toughness and a soft approach working at all?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I don't think you can combine the two. I think you have to either be tough, you have to increase the number of forces there and get tough, or you have to keep force levels regards low and back off. Those are the two broad choices. And the problem that you face is no matter which one you do, you lose. It's just a matter of choosing your poisons here.

Using another familiar image for the same thing, Mearsheimer also said that "the United States is basically in a situation where it's damned if it does and damned if it doesn't." A "get tough" policy will likely alienate even more Iraqis.  But appearing to back away from the conflict also is dangerous "because then we'll show weakness and the Iraqi people will tend to bandwagon with the insurgents."  He characterizes our present position as, "We're in a hopeless situation."

Later in the segment he presents a blunt assessment of the situation:

This is a question of strategy. Everybody agrees what the basic problem is here. But what is the strategy that we are going to employ to solve the problem? And there is no strategy on the table that's workable. Even if we shut down the insurgency in the short-term, again, the problem is what do we do on July 1 in terms of turning this over to some sort of viable political entity in Iraq? There is nothing there at the moment. The day is fast coming upon us. Furthermore, the Iraqi security forces as everybody here agrees are disintegrating in fronted of us. Our allies are abandoning us. Does it get much worse than this?

If the situation is as serious as he thinks - and I'm inclined to believe that it is - what we're facing in Iraq is how to exit the situation with the minimal possible damage.  Not a "good" exit versus a "bad" exit, or "showing will" versus "cutting and running."  The end is going to be bad, and the war has already damaged the United States badly.  As Robert Byrd told the Senate on Wednesday, recalling President Bush's foolish victory celebration prancing around in his flight suit on the USS Abraham Lincoln:

But the war in Iraq was not destined to follow the script of some idealized cowboy movie of President Bush's youth, where the good guys ride off into a rose-tinted sunset, all strife settled and all wrongdoing avenged. The war in Iraq is real, and as any soldier can tell you, reality is messy and bloody and scary. Nobody rides off into the sunset for fear that the setting sun will blind them to the presence of the enemies around them.