For as long as we have called for an immediate pullout from Iraq, the Democrats and Republicans running the War have changed their reasons for staying. Right now, both the number of Americans G.I.s in Iraq (over 170,000) and the number of Americans opposed to the War (over 60 percent) have reached new highs. We should expect the violent liars who started the War to fight the majority of Americans and Iraqis who know it’s past time to leave. Bush’s bipartisan allies in Congress continue to hock lies.

In the “mission accomplished” moment, the U.S. said it must stay in Iraq to “finish the job” and “root out the insurgency.” The “insurgents” were Saddam Hussein loyalists and Baath Party thugs, and we printed playing cards with pictures of the 55 most-wanted. Since then, 45 have been killed or captured. This reason to remain in Iraq has disappeared.

Next, we stayed after Hussein was captured and sovereignty was transferred to Iraqis … to oversee elections and to “rebuild.” The war planners told us that Iraq needed our GIs to train its own. After many protests in Iraq, the U.S. finally scheduled elections, but refused any referendum or democratic decision on whether we would remain. This was the “stay the course” milieu, when we would train Iraqis to “stand up, so we can stand down.”

Later, we heard that Al-Qaeda was the reason. Abu Musab al-Zarqawri, leader of “Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia,” took credit for bombings against Americans and Iraqis. Though al-Zarqawri was killed in July 2006, Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia is thriving. Our National Intelligence estimates explained what Bush can’t understand: the presence of Americans in Iraq increases the group’s numbers, increases terrorism in both Iraq and abroad and actually teaches them how to kill better. The NIE, and dozens of other reports, tell us that destroying Al-Qaeda in Iraq is not possible, as our presence feeds it. We cannot “fight them there, instead of here” without forcing “them” to grow.

Because the War was built on lies that could not be defended, Bush and his allies shifted gears: calls for the War’s end were treated as attacks on American forces. The phrase “support the troops” was hypnotic — everyone had to defend his or her support of troops in Iraq, because criticizing their presence was unsupportive. When veterans from the war replied, “support the troops: bring them home,” the War’s defenders refused to even meet with women like Cindy Sheehan, who camped out of Bush’s Texas home to protest the War. She knew supporting their War and supporting the troops were not the same thing, but Bush couldn’t bear it.

Now, we’re staying to prevent deaths. The people who say, “If we leave, Iraq will turn into chaos,” assume the U.S. is a big bulletproof vest. But after four years of Occupation, the number of attacks on Americans and Iraqis continues to rise. And last month, The New York Times documented that U.S. forces have always been the target of the most attacks. Despite the carnage of market bombings, more than four times as many attacks are aimed at U.S. troops. This is why a majority of Iraqis believe the U.S. provokes more attacks than it prevents. In response, we hear that any withdrawal, or even timetable for withdrawal, would make the mission a “failure.” Given the list of discredited reasons for the mission itself, it seems impossible to “win” and immoral to continue any “mission for success” that will kill more people.

Having to defend the indefensible, those who pretend to love Iraqis refuse to listen to Iraqis: for over two years, the majority of Iraqis have said they want the Occupation to end. The majority also said they favor withdrawal, even if security declines as a result. Bush says that the Iraqi government has not asked him to leave, so he’ll stay, no matter how many Iraqis disagree. A study from the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes also found that six in 10 Iraqis support attacks on Americans, though they overwhelmingly reject Al-Qaeda.

For the delusional who believe the U.S. is always a force of peace and stability, a mountain of bodies beg to differ. In September 2006, Johns Hopkins and Al Mustansiriya University scientists showed that between the violence, the malnutrition, the bombing of electricity plants and the white phosphorous, 660,000 Iraqis have died between the invasion and July 2006, as reported in The Lancet, a British medical journal. Bush said the report wasn’t credible, but British Ministry of Defense Scientific Adviser Sir Roy Anderson disagrees with the President of Fools: “The study design is robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to ‘best practice’ in this area.”

Internationally, most believe the U.S. acted illegally when it aggressively bombed and occupied Iraq — we were neither imminently threatened nor attacked by the country. At the Nuremberg Tribunal, lead prosecutor and Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson said an “aggressor” is a state that invades with “its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war … the territory of another State.” So if the decline of life expectancy, the rise in child malnutrition and the collapse of electricity since the U.S. decided to “Free Iraq” isn’t enough to make you rethink our ultrapious presence, maybe the standards we designed to try Nazis matter. We are clearly what Jackson condemned.

All evidence indicates the U.S. is unwilling or unable to stop the violence in Iraq. Simply, we make things worse by exacerbating a civil war between insurgents and our puppets in the Green Zone who ask us to stay and pay them. Those who refuse this reality seek a new justification (ethnic cleansing between barbaric Sunnis and fundamentalist Shiites!), though surely those in the Bush administration aren’t to be trusted. How high will the tower of death rise until we refuse the next lie, the next set of scare tactics, the next rush to bomb? No previous reason was sufficient to start the War and no future lie will justify the Occupation. There are no ethical reasons to stay in Iraq. The “least bad option” for America is to leave, pay reparations and never again trust someone seeking war. This isn’t naïve, as some will retort — it’s the most obvious conclusion based on these four years of deception and demolition.

Americans, who indulged lie after lie after lie, who allowed their government to use weapons of terror, who gave “the surge time to work” (which it hasn’t and won’t), have helped stack hundreds of thousands of bodies. Clearly, America’s slow moral realization has killed Iraqis. Our future and our safety will be determined by our commitment to peace. There never was, and never will be, a reason to invade and occupy Iraq.

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