This week I attended a special event at the Film Forum, where cocktail pianist Peter Mintun regaled the audience with songs from early talkies and, most fascinatingly for me, film clips from them.

Films from the late 1920s and early 1930s have always mesmerized me. These were the first people we could both see and hear at the same time. We can watch vibrant young people who thought they were living at the end of time just as we do, and yet whose America was so vastly different from ours. We get a look at a living reality that we could never have experienced firsthand.

As I left the theater, I found myself thinking that some people have taken issue with some aspects of sound film’s central place in modern life. I refer to people who resent that the copious footage of the Vietnam War, and returning body bags, played a part in the American public’s disenchantment with the war — and who have similar complaints today in regard to the Iraq war.

However, the conclusions of many wars are hardly comforting in hindsight. If World War I had been shorter because people had been able to see living color sound footage around the clock of the carnage in the trenches, I think this would have been a good thing. With our technology, we owe it to soldiers to grapple with their living reality in evaluating how long a war should go on.

In that light, I started out in support of the war in Iraq, maintaining a “sound footage” perspective of it in my mind. I knew that it would mean people being wounded or killed. I saw the first wounded soldiers as Americans in the late 1940s saw Harold Russell, who came back from World War II with hooks for hands and famously appeared in the film “The Best Years of Our Lives.” If drafted, I would gladly have gone to serve, and I would have sent a child into it feeling that it was a necessary sacrifice.

I no longer feel that way.

The democracy-spreading case for invasion convinced me at the time. Pacifism is not the most life-affirming response to a threat from people who combine medieval mindsets, oppositional identities, and access to 21st -century technology.

Okay, the Bushies dressed up the evidence on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. But in the larger scheme of things I was more interested in the possibility of refashioning Iraq into a Muslim country that was all about something other than hating us and the Israelis.

Iraq was the easiest target; Realpolitik isn’t pretty. Nor is war, but what’s going on in Iraq these days is beyond “not pretty.” It is, from anything I can perceive, hopeless, despite my attending as closely as I can to wise people insisting otherwise.

“Stay the course” — but what is the “course” in grappling with multiple, massive roving death squads whose very reason for living is to kill either Sunnis and Americans or Shiites and Americans, whose interest in actual nation-building is minimal, and who lack meaningful professional existences they yearn to return to?

Surely it is relevant that what unites the thugs is a sense of the American presence as a humiliation. Yes, once we left, the same people would commit further violence in resentment that we had been there or are anywhere else in the Muslim world. So, let’s not leave our soldiers in the line of fire of their perpetual humiliation.

Just as surely, upon our departure, the Sunnis and Shiites would set to tearing one another to pieces, with Syria and Iran pitching in. Not pretty, especially since we, albeit in the hopes of a larger good, unleashed it. But is this worth sending our children for an open-ended length of time to be killed in the crossfire?

Indeed, if we leave, we will vindicate the jihadists’ expectation that America lacks the stomach for a long fight. If “finishing the job” is going to mean a 10-year gorefest yielding a vastly reduced version of our initial intentions, then this lack of a “stomach” becomes a mark of moral advancement. The tolerance for multimillion body-bag counts that Iran and Iraq have shown the “stomachs” for in the past is hardly anything to brag about.

This war was predicated upon a hope that, unfortunately, has not been borne out. With modern technology bringing the grisly realities of what “stay the course” means to the living, breathing people we send into the battle, we ought muster a certain pride in being enlightened enough to decide that while it was worth a try, enough is enough. We should pick up the pieces as best we can and, as they say, “move on.”

Disputations about the meaning of Islamofascist or about how many people died at which point in World War II have their place. However, as things are in December 2006, are these abstract issues worth our sons or daughters coming home legless, rendered hideous by burns, or dead?

I am baffled by those who consider an answer in the affirmative to be an open and shut case.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.