The insistence of Iraq's occupation government on a timetable for the withdrawal of American forces from the country as part of an agreement to keep U.S. troops in Iraq is painful for the administration of President George W. Bush.

It is such a timetable that, in defiance of the will of the American people, expressed in the 2006 elections and in polls since, Mr. Bush has refused to provide. His position is that he will veto any legislation the Congress passes that contains such a withdrawal schedule.

That, in effect, puts the occupation government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki in perfect accord with the American people.

The other piece of irony is that the Bush administration turned itself inside out to put into place an occupation government that would at least give the appearance of independence from U.S. control. The Maliki government is, of course, scarcely independent. The only question to ask to make its status clear is how long Mr. Maliki will be able to stay in Iraq once U.S. forces are withdrawn? The answer would probably be, "hours."

At the same time, with the United Nations mandate under which U.S. forces are in Iraq now expiring Dec. 31, absent an agreement with the Maliki government any fig leaf of legitimacy will be stripped away.

How did we get into this mess? The short, pre-war-based answer is that the United States invaded Iraq with no endgame in mind. Victory was never defined. If it were defined in someone's mind at the time, adequate resources to bring it about were never planned nor committed.

Why are we still there? It used to be that the Bush administration was considered for political reasons unable to withdraw the United States from the morass because to have done so would have been to admit that we were wrong to have gone there in the first place. Now it's something else.

There is the real possibility that we are hanging on to try to gain some sort of special access to Iraq's resources for American oil companies. But it is also perfectly clear that the only way we could preserve such a presence would be to station significant numbers of American troops in Iraq forever to protect it.

The argument that chaos in Iraq would follow a U.S. withdrawal is an equally dead-end argument. In the meantime, the tame Maliki government has the Bush administration up a tree.

It isn't hard for the United States to gain the initiative. Announce that we have done as much in Iraq as we intend to do and proceed immediately to a systematic withdrawal of all our forces.