It’s the dead horse, or, depending on the week, the elephant in the room. It’s the thing we’ve all heard about incessantly since 2003, like some terrible broken record. I hate talking about it, and I hate reading about it.

It’s the Iraq War.

Ask about it around campus, and you’ll receive a lot of similar replies, replies so common I need not provide a sample. Americans everywhere are sick of it and excuses from the Bush administration.

A group of students at BYU — one of the nation’s most conservative major universities — recently staged a protest against an upcoming visit from Vice President Dick Cheney. CNN covered the story.

Another Seattle city-wide student walkout is planned this month in protest of the War.

Former Presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) has been making rounds on the interview circuit to rally support for a vote to cut troop funding. This move would effectively force troop withdrawal even if no date for withdrawal can be legislated directly. The idea is understandably popular with a lot of people.

Also popular with a lot of the same people are bumper stickers that say “Support Our Troops.”

What exactly does that mean?

It may be, as Marge from The Simpsons once indicated, little more than “a nice joke.”

Vehement opposition to the war and what it stands for is a given in most academic circles. The War is no longer about “terror” in the global, concrete, sends-a-chill-down-your-spine sense. No WMDs were ever found. It may be about terror in the good-excuse-for-an-illegal-occupation sense, but that one is hard to pawn off on anybody.

More than anything, the Iraq War may be about preventing outright civil war in Iraq. Some have argued that such a condition already exists. Still, even many of these critics agree that a sudden U.S. troop withdrawal could result in much worse conditions.

I was opposed to the war from the beginning. Saddam Hussein was certainly a detestable dictator, but he was and is not alone, and his removal alone did not and does not justify the war. In fact, the war is probably unjustifiable at any level.

Unfortunately, these assertions, although rehashed on network news almost daily, do nothing for the present.

Rational thought tells us to stop killing soldiers and civilians, stop spending money and stop wasting time in a stalemate with domestic criminals in a foreign land.

What about moral obligation? In some ways, this topic has been another elephant in the room, and he’s not necessarily waving a GOP flag.

However pointless, wasteful and tragic the war has been, can the collective U.S., in good moral conscience, tell the Iraqis, “It’s your problem now,” and go back to business as usual? If global human rights is as significant an issue as many of us believe it is, can we ignore — truly ignore — the conditions of squalor that may result from complete U.S. withdrawal?

I would think not. However, I do not believe this precludes an end to the war.

Although leading Democrats and an increasingly large band of rogue Republicans have tried to sugarcoat it, a cut in troop funding equates to a cut in troop support. At the end of the day, military personnel need more than a pat on the back and a care package from some church group to keep themselves in business.

The problem, as some of us see it, is the nature of their business at present.

I’m a big fan of “leave no trace” camping, but there’s probably no such thing as “leave no trace” military invasion, and military leaders hoping to leave the nation as good or better than they found it are chasing a pipedream.

Regardless of the troop surge, troops may well be doomed to get no further in battle than they have gone already. Since shooting doesn’t seem to be doing much these days, it might be a good time to try something else, say, a reduction in armed forces with more funding for humanitarian aid, infrastructure development and social services, for example.

It is certainly one of the worst and most complicated situations our nation has ever faced, but an easy solution like abandoning Iraqi civilians and our own troops — in a way, acting like the war never happened — will probably not produce a desirable end result.

Come to think of it, I hate writing about it, too.

Reach columnist Andrew Brown at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.