On Monday, Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the multi-national force in Iraq, testified before Congress on the state of the Iraq War. In his testimony politicians and citizens were looking for answers. Is the surge working? What is a viable exit strategy? When can the troops come home? And underlying all the others – is there a chance, even a slight one, that we can still win the war?

For the past four years, the Iraq War has been in every newspaper, permeated every evening news broadcast and ranked at the foremost of voter concerns. Nearly 3,800 American soldiers are dead. Before you continue, take a moment to consider how great a number 3,800 is when dealing with human lives – and imagine how great a cause must be to merit such a sacrifice. More honestly, ask yourself what cause would be great enough if even one of those was your brother or your husband or your best friend.

Now examine Iraq. Estimates of how many Iraqi lives have been lost in the war vary greatly; Iraq Body Count, a group of activists and academics, has recorded upward of 78,000 violent civilian deaths. To most of us, that’s just a number. The war has barely affected American civilians. The Iraqi civilian’s life has been shattered. Health care and education systems are in shambles. Clean water, electricity and fuel are in short supply. Reconstruction efforts are mostly failing. The International Red Cross and Red Crescent movement called Iraq an “ever-worsening humanitarian crisis” in a report earlier this year.

So no, in a very real sense, we can never win this war. And as time marches on, as the death tolls rise and international support drops, comparisons to Vietnam, another unwinnable war, continue to multiply. A war of ideology, an American identity crisis and an American president being less than honest.

The legacy Vietnam left in our country is one of protesting the draft, troops who served with bravery but were sometimes greeted back home as traitors and the last helicopters fleeing Saigon. One American soldier, Serge Schmemann, wrote in the International Herald Tribune, “Many Americans who had served in Vietnam were stunned that ‘Vietnam’ meant something completely different back home. It had ceased referring to the country we had tried, for better or worse, to help, and had become shorthand for a monumental domestic crisis of identity.”

How much is “Iraq” even about a concrete place anymore? Has it not come to symbolize congressional partisanship, a purposefully misleading commander in chief, isolationism vs. imperialism and the plausibility of spreading democracy? There are no WMDs. Saddam is long dead. The coalition government is limping along.

Stay until we finish the job. Fix what we broke. Help those who cannot help themselves. Make the world safe for democracy. So much of what is said is framed in the storied language of the U.S. acting the benevolent and virtuous part granted us by being the lone superpower. The wants and needs of the average Iraqi citizen are too often discarded and ignored. The truth is, I doubt our ability to even comprehend, much less execute what the Iraqis need. Sadder yet, I doubt that “what the Iraqi people need” is the first, or even second priority at this point, or that it ever has been. Did we ever have the right or the ability to bring down Saddam Hussein or to introduce democracy here?

In 1973, President Nixon said that he “insisted on peace with honor” during end of war agreement negotiations. For many South Vietnamese, this turned out to be hardly more than empty sentiment when two years later the American forces finished their evacuation, turning away hundreds of the refugees they had pledged to help.

Honor indeed.

Today the question is no longer one of victory or democracy. Today we should ask ourselves which is more honorable – fulfilling a responsibility to finish the job once you have begun, or admitting when you have made a terrible, deadly mistake?