Tomorrow is the day when the fabulous Baker boys, aka The Iraq Study Group, which is supposed to be the Bush administration analogue to the group of “wise men” who advised president Johnson during the Vietnam war, officially releases their long-awaited, if not terribly useful, report and recommendations. We should not be surprised that the report will not offer anything useful. Blue-ribbon panels are one of the oldest dodges in the book. And after all, the nine men and one woman on the panel are members in good standing Washington insiders who got picked for the job because of their don’t-rock-the-boat reputations. Who knows, someday, they might want to serve on another White House commission.

The recommendations will be available online at 11 a.m. tomorrow on the sites of four organizations tied to the group: the U.S. Institute of Peace; the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University; the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and the Center for the Study of the Presidency.

Why do I write, “not terribly useful”? Because for America the war in Iraq is lost. In fact, it has been lost for quite some time. Don’t take my word for it. See what William Lind of the conservative Free Congress Foundation wrote. He starts off with this, “The war in Iraq is irredeemably lost. Neither we nor, at present, anyone else can create a new Iraqi state to replace the one our invasion destroyed.”

National Intelligence Director John Negroponte says Iraq’s cities are less secure and the enemy harder to identify in comparison to the situation in much of Vietnam when he served as a U.S. diplomat there in the 1960s.

Now that even establishment media is now referring to Iraq as a civil war we might note that use of the term “civil war” works to put responsibility onto the Iraqis and away from the US itself - even if, under the terms of the Geneva conventions, an occupying power is responsible for maintaining security. When the last time anyone thought the situation in Iraq was secure?

We now know that even Donald Rumsfeld, he of the formerly eternally optimistic view that it will all work out if only we stand firm, thought it was time for a change. His classified memo to the White House, finished one day before the mid-term elections, acknowledged that the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq was not working and called for a major course correction. “In my view it is time for a major adjustment,” he wrote. “Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.”

When you have lost a war the only rational thing a country can do is withdraw its forces from the field of battle, honor the dead, care for the wounded, and move on.  Any report that does not act on that single central reality is useless.

Of course, the right wing and even many centrists and liberals will not accept that. The ISG, which by all news accounts, will recommend some kind of phased withdrawal, –what we might call walk and run, as opposed to cut and run– will be derided as surrender monkeys. The always reliable reactionary Frank Gaffney has done just that in the Washington Times.

Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies pegged it exactly when he wrote in an October report that “The US cannot wait to see if its existing strategy and actions will work. They will not. The situation is spiraling out of control, and the U.S. must either strongly reinforce its existing strategy or change it.”

Since the Bush administration has been saying for years now that the U.S. will stay in Iraq only as long as we are wanted perhaps they should take a clue from their newest constituency, the Iraqi people. According to a September poll by the University of Maryland seven in ten Iraqis want U.S.-led forces to commit to withdraw within a year.

The effort foster democracy in Iraq is clearly unobtainable. The cost of continuing the effort, when success is unachievable, is clearly immoral. Consider that the Iraq war is costing $226 million a day — or $8 billion a month, $76 billion a year. There are 23 armed militias in Baghdad alone. Each government minister and scores of tribal leaders have their own self-defense force. Some 2 million Iraqis have fled their homes, the equivalent of 30 million Americans displaced by war.

As Nicholas. Kristof writes today in the New York Times, “One of the essential paradoxes is that even well-meaning efforts to stabilize Iraq with our military presence inflame Iraqi nationalism and bolster nationalist extremists. Inadvertently, because we’re not sensitive enough to how our actions are perceived in the Iraqi cauldron, we end up empowering extremists who destabilize the country.”

There is one way to depower those extremists. Leave.