Iraq’s shrinking population looks more ungrateful everyday to American generosity as our holy leaders express their “limited patience” with that country's amputees. From Congress to the new candidates, one thing’s for sure — Iraqis don’t know what’s good for them. Whether we stay for another century or just another decade, America’s leaders insist that the flower-parades begin at once. Although six in 10 Iraqis approve of attacks on Americans, and Bush thinks another 21,500 GIs will make Iraqis like us more, our government continues to scold Iraqis for disobeying our orders and treating us like occupiers. We treat these petulant Iraqis like a problem child who just won't grow up and love us.

After the initial shock of being greeted as invaders, Americans ignored the majority of Iraqis who said they wanted the occupation to end — in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. Our country maintained that her presence was a force of stability, a wave of liberty, even though millions of Iraqis said that the U.S. should leave, even if security deteriorates. A World Public Opinion Poll in November found that 70 percent of Iraqis, across religious and political lines, wanted the Occupation to conclude. A majority of Iraqis continue to believe that the U.S. provokes more violence then it prevents, but Americans keep insisting, “if we leave, there will be chaos!”

Yet Iraqis don’t feel freer, happier or more pro-American for reasons that still escape us. When Bush and Pelosi talk tough to al-Malaki and insist that America’s commitment isn’t “open-ended,” they act as if America is doing Iraq a favor. This four-year-long season of giving, as Dick Cheney must imagine it, is our Empire-Altruism. Democratic Senator Jim Webb moans that the war’s costs have been “staggering” to the U.S., forgetting that they are apocalyptic in Iraq.

The Coalition Provisional Authority, between rewriting Iraq’s constitution to benefit American companies and stubbornly refusing any elections, claimed that it was ruling in Iraq’s best interests. So, the Oil Ministry was guarded, but the archives, museums and weapons depots were looted. When the “dead-enders” refused to accept that Saddam was gone, the great Americans scoured Iraq to find him.

We even remodeled Fallujah twice. Once a city with nearly a million people, it has been leveled by us twice. Bush the Giver even dropped white phosphorous on Fallujah in 2004, melting men, women and children who lived near those most ungrateful dead-enders: the insurgents. For nearly four years, we’ve heard that insurgents have hated Democracy. They supported Saddam Hussein and fear Democracy will taste so sweet that no Iraqi will ever accept less.

But Iraqis know it wasn’t "insurgents,” “militias” or “terrorists” who supported Saddam for a decade — it was Americans. It wasn’t Iran’s feared mullahs who gave Saddam many WMDs (remember them?) to gas civilians. And it wasn’t “Islamofacists” who made it a mission to keep Hussein’s bloody rule afloat. It was Americans.

As Congress’ “patience” lessens for Iraqis to build George Bush Square, our ahistoric Congress imagines slick plans to “win.” But what’s winning, anyhow? Bush is loathe to define it, other than the blurry “war on terror ally” classification that includes dictators like Pervez Musharaff, who doesn’t recognize Israel, runs a thug army called the ISI and is fingered by the Afghan government for supporting the Taliban and safeguarding both bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar. Winning, to our government, is independent of the Iraqi death doll.

Perhaps it’s Iraqis who are too choked-up on the past. A decade of US-written, demanded and enforced sanctions did cause the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children — but that was last century! And Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples, though all the defendants claim that they were following orders. Even though every literate American had a chance to read Rumsfeld’s and Gonzales’s memos that authorize torture, kidnapping and extraordinary rendition elsewhere, it was no worse than hazing. There’s a crumb of a chance that Iraqis haven’t forgotten that American indifference crushed a Shiite rebellion in 1991, and that American-made and financed weapons in Revolutionary Guard hands brutalized the population throughout the ’80s. It could even be the sky-high cancer rates throughout the deleted-uranium-drenched country that prejudice Iraqis to armed Americans.

But that’s all in the past (except for depleted uranium, which will cause cancer for thousands of years). Now, America, like Iraq so many times before, has turned a corner. We’re in Iraq for Iraqis. So, when our leaders boast about their callous plans to continue the Occupation, think quietly about the continuing pattern of American influence on Iraq. When some applaud the Democrats’ response to Bush, ask if it’s bullshit to think that this country has “endured” the war. Ask if it's humane to only count American casualties.

Think about the invasion and occupation of Iraq —– now approaching four bloody years —– and consider how the world defined “aggressive war” after World War II.

Why would anyone in Iraq not welcome 174,000 fully armed Americans? Why would anyone in Iraq, after forty-four months of occupation, a decade of starvation and a decade of Hussein’s worst excesses, not trust that America is considering the best way to find a peaceful outcome? Likewise, list the lies we've heard and think about why anyone would start believing them now!

As time passes, the crime intensifies. The US-instigated civil war has overtaken Iraq, and all outcomes are uncertain. What is glaringly obvious to Iraqis is that no part of the American government has ever had any interest in the betterment of Iraq. Our motives have not changed in decades; only our rationale and our methods have taken new shapes. What’s best for Iraq is for its worst tormentor to abandon it immediately, pay reparations for over 20 years of terror and impeach and indict its leaders with the crimes we are all aware it commits.

The consequences of persistence — of prolonging the occupation — of 200 Iraqi bodies for every American in the pile of dead — of the lies, the torture and the napalm — are ferocious. Bush and Congress warn our departure will trigger calamity and horror — but that’s all happening now. Iraq isn’t a problem child, we’re a brutal occupier. End the occupation.

Jeff Purcell is a graduate student in Africana Studies. He can be reached at jlp56@cornell.edu. Brutal Honesty appears Mondays.