Michael Gisick/Tribune

A U.S. Marine passes an Iraqi girl during a patrol in the Sunni city of Ramadi in early October. Although Sunni areas have quieted considerably this year, the average Iraqi still lives at the margins.

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I went to Iraq to report on the U.S. military — particularly on the front-line soldiers and Marines from New Mexico fighting this war. I wanted to tell their stories.

But as I walked the streets of Baghdad and Ramadi with the U.S. patrols, I found myself drawn to another set of voices, too.

I'd hear them as soldiers questioned Iraqi men and women, trying to learn more about the neighborhoods they controlled.

I'd hear a mother say her son had been killed in a Sunni neighborhood because he had a Shiite name, even though he was a Sunni.

I'd hear an interpreter say his father had survived a first assassination attempt but not a second.

As the fickle electricity blinked off and the empty streets went silent, it was almost possible to hear the tales of the Iraqi people echoing from the rubble and the abandoned, dying gardens.

A lot of soldiers, to be candid, don't care much about the plight of the Iraqi people. But many do. Many realize that, if they're going to come out of Iraq with any kind of real success, they have to learn to understand these stories.

One of the really impressive things I found in Iraq were the many young American officers trying to figure out how to put Iraq back together. This is a complicated task. Figuring out why the electricity was off in a single neighborhood requires the skills of a diplomat, the dogged determination of an investigator, the logic of an engineer. It also meant determining how the flow of electricity got stopped in the first place, which meant delving into the tragic mysteries of everyday life in Iraq — a Shiite generator operator chased from the neighborhood, a power line fallen during fighting.

So it's easy to see why understanding the stories of the Iraqi people is so important to the American troops operating in Iraq. But I'd argue it's equally important for Americans at home to understand them, because I fear our failure to listen is leading us toward a gigantic cop-out.

You already hear it from politicians, especially those who supported the war, framing their growing opposition in terms of the failures of the Iraqi government. You see it in the view that American troops should not risk their lives to prevent someone else's civil war.

But the tragedy of Iraq, simply put, is our fault. We deposed a regime that, for all its spectacular failures, managed to provide security and basic services to most of its citizens, and we haven't managed to restore either.

Thinking we can just bail out, blaming it all on the Bush administration and closing our eyes to the slaughter that will almost certainly follow, is both irresponsible and shortsighted.

That would not be the case if the majority of Iraqis were determined to kill each other, but they aren't. The sectarian gangs that have brought the country to its knees are no more an expression of broad popular feeling than are gangs like West Side Locos and TCK in Albuquerque.

It's not hard to understand how these militias came to such prominence. Think of it this way: What would happen if every vestige of law enforcement suddenly vanished from Albuquerque's streets, if nobody had a job anymore and everything was broken?

How long would it be until the TCKs and the West Side Locos of the city filled the vacuum with their turf wars?

Then what would you do?

The truth is, you'd probably do what most Iraqis have done. You'd flee, if you could. If you couldn't, you'd hide. And if you couldn't hide, you'd participate or you'd die.

In a world like that, blaming Iraqis for failing to produce a functioning government seems laughable.

You have to wonder what the politicians really expected. Did they really believe a country with no democratic traditions, shackled for decades by a brutal dictatorship, split by latent sectarian suspicions and surrounded by some of the worst neighbors in the world would magically find a stable footing within two or three years?

So here we are, almost five years, $450 billion and 4,000 American lives later. There are signs of progress in Iraq, but plenty of reasons for pessimism, too.

The military says it has changed, learning from hard experience, but so much damage has been done in the last four years that it's possible Iraq has slipped irretrievably from our grasp.

I'm not here to tell you how to think about the war. But I will say this: If Iraq falls to the gangs and militias, we might salve our conscience, but a lot of people who only wanted to live their lives peaceably are never going to forget who let their country fall apart. And the world has a long memory.