Shortly after the election, in which the war in Iraq was only one of the issues over which the governing party took a drubbing, the president said he was open to suggestions on how to proceed in Iraq.

Obviously, the commander-in-chief didn’t know what to do to get out of the nightmare he had created for both Iraq and the United States. More people were dying in Iraq than ever before and no strategy, if there ever was one, to contain Iraqi resistance seemed to be working.

And then, with his tail between his legs because of the election, he had the impudence, within hearing of the families of nearly 3,000 dead troops, to admit that he didn’t know what to do.

The American people (yes, the same ones who supported the invasion in 2003 and re-elected Bush in 2004) had shown at the ballot box that ``staying the course’’ was not an option because too many people were dying and there was too little progress in securing Iraq and getting out.

Now that the violence between Shiites and Sunnis has escalated to a full-fledged civil war (last week was the deadliest yet), American casualties have begun to decline as troops apparently stand aside almost helplessly as Iraqis kill each other.

Again this week, the president reiterated his refusal to withdraw troops ``before the mission is complete." That mission, changing all the time since the invasion, now is merely to stabilize the country, a task we figured would be a cinch as tanks rolled across the desert in 2003.

We invaded with the misguided notion that we would depose Saddam, get rid of his weapons of mass destruction, install a pro-U.S. democratic government, build some military bases and get out. Talk about ignorance.

We knew the authoritarian Saddam was able to keep Iraq from sectarian violence only by his harsh crackdowns against Kurds, Shiites and any other group suspected of opposition. It took a dictatorship to hold the ethnic and Muslim diversity of Iraq together.

After the ethnic bloodshed in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the Bush government should have realized what would happen in Iraq. Its obsession with getting Saddam obviously blinded it to the downside of sudden liberation _ civil war.

We’ve always been better at installing strongmen to put down revolts or end civil wars, such as in Latin and Central America through much of the 20th century. Ousting a dictator and creating a civil war is fairly virgin territory.

U.S. involvement in civil wars, naturally, is not new. Most of our experience has been in taking sides (though often the wrong one) and trying to help our choice win. In the Iraq case, we unintentionally created the conditions for civil war and don’t know what to do to stop it.

The civil war in Vietnam developed after the French were forced out and the nation was artificially divided. Because of our obsession with stopping the communists before they landed on our Pacific shores, we were on the wrong side in that conflict _ against the nationalists of North Vietnam who had the popular support needed for victory.

You’ve heard Bush offer the same kind of scare talk, that if we don’t fight the enemy in Iraq, then next they’ll be at our Atlantic doorstep. This time the enemy may be al-Qaida and Islamic fascism, but we seem just as deluded.

After what we’ve done in Iraq, unraveling the autocratic twine that held its factions together, it may not be possible to reach a political solution with our involvement and our presence. That means we should leave and let them fight it out.

Right now they’re fighting it out right under our noses _ and most of the victims are innocent people.

It would have been easier to just have the CIA arrange to get rid of Saddam like we did Allende in Chile, rebel leaders in El Salvador and numerous other thorns in our side during previous decades.

But it’s too late now. The civil war has begun and we don’t know how to take sides or how to stop it.

We’ve already been in Iraq longer than in the Korean War, longer than in the war against Japan in World War II and a lot longer than in World War I.

If we let it, Iraq will become the longest war in our history _ and the one during the past century that we could have most-easily avoided.

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Cary Brunswick, managing editor of The Daily Star, can be reached at (607) 432-1000, ext. 217, or cary@thedailystar.com.