World War I left us with another war to fight.

World War II left us with the Iron Curtain.

Korea left us with an uneasy peace and now a North Korean regime that threatens to annihilate the planet every couple of weeks.

Vietnam we lost, so that doesn't count.

The Gulf War? We were left with another war to fight.

And this year, the invasion of Iraq.

Avid readers of this column (and are there any other kind?) will remember that I was all-for the war in the months leading up to the invasion.

I still think it was justified, given the mass graves uncovered from Saddam Hussein's despotic regime and that Saddam is no longer subsidizing Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel.

Weapons of mass destruction — President Bush's main justification for the war — haven't been found despite Saddam having used a good deal of them on his own people.

That means that the CIA's pre-war conclusions were wrong, somebody was lying, or Bush was determined no matter what to invade Iraq after 9/11, even if the Iraqis had nothing to do with that particular act of terrorism.

It's the so-called peace that has me regretting a whole lot of what I said and wrote before we invaded.

Frankly, I'm feeling just a little bit sheepish these days. After all, before the war I had written columns advocating it. I even argued for it at two local public forums.

For a while, things went pretty much as I expected. Our troops fought magnificently. Our battlefield technology proved itself superior, and our generals had a darned good plan. The war was "won" rapidly and efficiently.

But golly, I honestly thought the Bush administration would have a plan for dealing with Iraq — and Iraqis — ready when the battles were over.

Apparently, the only plan was to enter Baghdad in a parade and expect the citizenry to rejoice like happy Filipinos greeting Douglas MacArthur.

It hasn't turned out that way.

It seems for some strange reason that an increasing number of Iraqis look upon us not as liberators, but as occupiers, and infidels, to boot.

In Arab minds, it has turned from a U.S. vs. Saddam war into a Jewish-Christian Crusaders vs. Muslims occupation.

Just this week, a "top-secret" CIA report said that more and more Iraqis figure the U.S. and its few allies can be beaten and are supporting attacks on Americans and others.

The gloomy report stood in marked contrast to the public pronouncements of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and their acolytes at Fox News Channel and the Wall Street Journal that we're actually winning the peace.

Bush keeps talking about establishing a thriving democracy in Iraq.

Forget about it. Iraq has no history of democracy. All of the Arab nations are dictatorships, with virtually no freedom of speech or assembly. The only democracy in the whole Middle East is Israel, which knows a little something about fighting the kind of conflict we've stumbled into.

Meanwhile, the insurgents are killing civilians, Italian soldiers and a lot of our people. More than 150 Americans have died since George W. "Mission Accomplished" Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1.

And even L. Paul Bremer, who heads the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, says the worst is yet to come. We can expect more and more casualties and anticipate having to spend more and more money in a situation that is taking on an eerie similarity to what happened to us in Vietnam.

Our soldiers will continue to fight bravely, but the home front — more than 50 percent of the public disapproves of Bush's policies on Iraq in the latest poll — is beginning to get angry and frustrated.

Bush seems to be counting on a policy of "Iraqization," reminiscent of Richard Nixon's attempt at "Vietnamization," getting the home country's soldiers to die instead of Americans.

It didn't work in Vietnam, and it isn't likely to work in Iraq.

Bush continues trying to paint the conflict as part of the war against terror. He's not leveling with us. But then, he didn't level with us before the war, when his administration insisted Iraqi oil would pay for its own reconstruction.

Before we invaded, we heard nothing about American taxpayers having to spend so much money — the $87 billion recently approved by Congress is just for one year — and how more and more of our young people would be coming home maimed or in body bags after "the war" was over.

I'm thoroughly disgusted, and remember, I was for the war. Mr. Bush had better come up with some sort of exit strategy from Iraq soon, or the American voting public will have an exit strategy for its president next November.

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Sam Pollak is editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at spollak@thedailystar.com or at (607) 432-1000, ext. 208.