On the same day President Bush released his optimistic “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,” Andrew Terrill and Conrad Crane released their own bleak analysis of what it will take to get the United States out of Iraq.

Based on their respective track records, you’d have to go with Terrill and Crane.

The two men are not left-wing Bush-bashers, nor even members of the allegedly liberal mainstream media. They are military scholars and former Army officers. Crane is director of the Army’s Military History Institute. Terrill is the Middle East specialist at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pa.

In February 2003, as the Bush administration was preparing to invade Iraq and anticipating a candy-and-flowers reception from the Iraqi people, Terrill and Crane issued a paper that predicted the U.S. would “win the war but lose the peace.”

They predicted an armed resistance to the U.S. presence, a harsh response by U.S. troops that would only inflame anti-American sentiment and enormous problems in establishing a stable Iraqi government. They urgently warned against disbanding the Iraqi army. They foresaw a “radically different world over the next few years, a world in which the threat of Saddam Hussein seems like a pale shadow of new problems of America’s own making.”

In short, they nailed it. They should have been given jobs in the office of the National Security Adviser. Instead, they watched in alarm, like most serious military scholars, as the administration’s neo-con ideologues bungled matters in post-war Iraq and shredded the Army’s capabilities.

Now Terrill and Crane are back with a monograph published by the Strategic Studies Institute and available online. People looking for a realistic way out of Iraq are well advised to take a hard look at it.

Terrill and Crane agree with President Bush that setting a precise timetable for U.S. withdrawal would be a terrible mistake. The nation would almost certainly descend into a brutal civil war for which the U.S. would rightly be blamed. They also agree with the president that getting Iraqi forces to assume the security burden is critical.

They disagree on how likely that is and on how long the U.S. can afford to wait. The president says the insurgency will be defeated. Terrill and Crane doubt it: “It appears increasingly unlikely that U.S., Iraqi and coalition forces will crush the insurgency prior to the beginning of a phased U.S. and coalition withdrawal,” they write.

The president said that 212,000 Iraqi forces are now trained and ready to begin assuming more of the security burden. Terrill and Crane say that unless those forces are multi-ethnic, loyal to the central government rather than to tribal or religious factions, their long-term effectiveness is doubtful. They say it’s likely that Iraqi forces are shot through with spies from the insurgency.

Moreover, as soon as the U.S. starts to pull out – whenever that is – Terrill and Crane say the security vacuum will be filled with ethnic and sectarian militias. As evidence, they point to what happened in the northern city of Mosul in the spring of 2004 when the 101st Airborne Division rotated back to the U.S. and was replaced by a Stryker brigade one-third as large. Mosul, which had mostly been calm during the first year of the U.S. occupation, descended into sectarian violence.

The president says the U.S. “will stay as long as it takes.” Terrill and Crane argue that geopolitical concerns, coupled with stresses on the Army’s manpower and equipment, mean that the U.S. can afford only three more years in Iraq, at most.

The long-term dilemma of the U.S. position in Iraq can perhaps best be summarized as “We can’t stay, we can’t leave, and we can’t fail,” the scholars conclude.

What, then, becomes the exit strategy for a place we can’t leave? The president says we’ll leave when Iraq is a functional, inclusive democratic state that is supported by other nations in the region and the international community.

History suggests that’s too much to hope for, Terrill and Crane write. In other postwar efforts, “local realities” in defeated nations trumped the goals of occupying nations. “The best course of action appears to be to … aim for generic peace and stability,” they say.

In other words, as soon as the Iraqis come up with something that looks like it will hold together, without the tyranny of Saddam or a genocidal civil war, we should head for the door.

These two former officers conclude, in very polite language, that the next time U.S. policymakers decide to spend the lives of American troops on an orgy of nation-building in “states we do not fully understand,” they should know how to get out before they get in.

Nobody listened to Terrill and Crane in 2003. Maybe it will be different next time around.