Rarely has a midterm election in America made so many waves. Even interviews with the man in the street in Baghdad suggest there is no shortage of views on what the Democratic win in both houses of Congress means.

Just as important is how these elections have sharpened the focus on what America can do about Iraq. Should America get out, stay the course, or dig in deeper?

Far more than Vietnam, this conflict comes with a clear definition of victory or defeat.

Victory is leaving in place a system that can survive internecine sectarian and ethnic wars among the Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish Iraqis, as well as stand up to interference from its neighbors, starting with Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. That system is not in place.

To be sure, America can achieve victory by sending in another 150,000 troops and making a commitment to stay in Iraq for five more years and play midwife, policeman, and protector until the Iraqis absorb enough nation building to learn they have to live together.

But a look at the results of those midterm elections, which turned rather sharply on Iraq, is enough to understand that the American public is not willing to grant Iraqis — whose aptitude for peaceful discourse is, to say the least, not evident — any more American tears, dollars, or sweat.

In this time of American hegemony, America’s foreign policy and military apparatus are not trained to mediate sectarian divides in foreign lands and simultaneously engage in nation building.

One hopes that will change before the next, and inevitable, regime-change war America engages in — once our military-industrial complex has the time to absorb and learn the lessons of Iraq.

That leaves the other solution, which is getting out.

Defeat is leaving the place to succumb to all its ills and descend into a cesspool of terror groups, Al Qaeda laboratories, and guerrilla factions committed to eternal fighting. That cannot come to pass, but it will if America makes an unplanned exit.

Getting out is not the same as bugging out.

An American disengagement from Iraq must be a gradual retreat to established military bases near the country’s borders with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Jordan, as well as inside Kurdistan, where we have long-standing cordial relations with the population.

Under this plan, the new brief for American troops will be twofold: Get off the streets of Iraqi cities. Jump in only to rectify the balance when outside forces flagrantly interfere to tilt it into one camp or another.

This brief must include occasional attacks against, but no invasions of, Syria and Iran.

One easy and seriously painful Iranian target — and we have aimed at it before, during the 1980–88 Iraq-Iran conflict — is its offshore oil platforms. Such a target has the advantage of being incremental and easily accessed from the air, without the use of ground troops. It denies the Iranians a source of income from their oil exports but gives them time to sober up, hit after hit. Such an approach certainly worked back in the 1980s to bring Ayatollah Khomeini to the negotiating table with Saddam Hussein — back when Saddam was our ally.

With Syria, tactics must also include an air campaign that hits not only oil fields and refineries, but seats of power as well.

With this new configuration in Iraq, the American military presence can easily be cut in half and the military bases built up into impregnable fortresses — huge green zones, if you like.

An early look at the James Baker feasibility study for President Bush suggests that what the old fox is going for is talks with Iran and Syria. That, too, is fine, after they have been bombed.

America cannot be seen to be digging deeper into what has become a war of attrition, where the enemy decides when and where to hit and sets the agenda. This cycle has got to be broken.

In the new configuration, Iraq can have its civil war, as it appears that all Iraqis must wade into yet more conflict before settling on a new balance of power.

America’s best plan now is to get out of the street fight but make sure that no one wins until cooler heads prevail throughout the whole neighborhood.