Patrick O’Donnel, a well-known photojournalist whose work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, Reuters, Associated Press and a host of other outlets, is a friend of 20 years.

Patrick cut his teeth shooting pictures of the anti-Soviet guerrilla war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He currently runs Angles, an Irish saloon in Adams Morgan in Washington patronized predominantly by writers, reporters and commentators who had been around the block a few times.

The other day we were shooting the breeze in his saloon as Patrick, who knows how to string words together being the Irish American that he is, regaled us with a few astute observations about the quagmire — and is it not time, pray tell, we started calling it just that — that the US finds itself in in Iraq.

“It all started in Afghanistan, you know, back in 1980,” he said. “That’s when the Soviets spent the first few months demonstrating their superiority as a big power in their confrontation with the Mujahedeen, and the next nine years demonstrating their weakness. In Iraq, in like manner, we spent the first few months demonstrating our superiority, our ability to shock and awe, and the last three years demonstrating our weakness vis-à-vis the irregular forces of the insurgency.”

So, Patty, where’s the punch line here?

“Well, simply this: It was in Afghanistan where the myth about the invincibility of a big power was first punctured, and this is being repeated in Iraq today.”

The problem the Soviets faced in Afghanistan, Patrick added, was that the military brass that prepared for the invasion were the same folks who had planned the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. And they assured their political leaders in the Kremlin that Afghanistan will be an easy task, a one-sided contest, a cakewalk, if you wish, as Czechoslovakia had been, refusing to contend with the notion that, unlike a Central European satellite republic, a South Asian society organized around ethnic and tribal ties, would represent a different theater of operations — a difficult political challenge, a different culture of martyrdom and a different people heir to a different historical experience and moral values. You extrapolate in such a facile fashion and you pay dearly, as the Soviets discovered after almost a decade of bloody war.

American political leaders, refusing to ponder what would transpire in Iraq “the day after,” went on to behave as if the US had the time, the resources and the know-how to re-engineer an alien society. It was that kind of hubris that resulted in the messianic delusions and dangerous flights of fancy of the neoconservatives, the architects of the war.

Patrick, who is a competent poker player, was not that night above resorting to metaphors from the game he loves to make a point. “You should know when to cut your losses and fold your cards,” he said, “especially if there’s not much in the pot to warrant the risk of losing all your chips.”

These days American leaders, from President Bush on down, continue to turn a blind eye to the stubborn — in places tragic and gut-wrenching — realities that define the war and the immeasurable sorrows caused the Iraqi people by it.

Consider this: At a hearing in Congress last Thursday, where Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld faced some of the toughest questioning in his career about the course of US strategy in Iraq, the Pentagon chief disputed assertions that the US campaign was faltering and argued that the conflict there remains worth its costs in lives and money.

He also rejected the idea of setting a timetable for withdrawing US troops, which flies in the face of the feeling by a large majority of Americans, according to several recent polls, who are beginning to feel uneasy about when the conflict will end, and uncertain about the wisdom of an open-ended US involvement there.

“Any who say we have lost or are losing are flat wrong,” he said in his opening statement. “We are not.”

President Bush has evinced the same defiant, phantasist posture about “staying the course,” heeding neither declining public support nor Congressional criticism. “Bring ‘em on,” he thundered early on during his first term in office, referring to the insurgents. Bush is already six months into his second term. He is commander in chief of a war that a record number of Americans no longer believe in, a war being waged in unmapped territory that will surely outlast his presidency.

As he met last Friday with a visiting Iraqi delegation, headed by Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, the president not only refused to set a timetable for pulling the troops out of Iraq but predicted “victory” in what he described as a difficult battle against “fanatical killers.” His remarks came hours after insurgents in Fallujah killed 5 female Marines and injured 13 others. (And we had thought all along the town had been “liberated.”)

In a joint news conference, Jaafari said the war was a “just and winnable cause” and is going well despite the carnage the public sees nightly on television. Estimates of the war’s civilian death toll range from 25,000 to 100,000. US losses are put at more than 1700 dead and 12,000 injured. More than 50 percent of Americans now say that the Iraqi campaign was a mistake, and that the White House did not level with them from the outset.

“Every major poll has shown an ever larger majority of Iraqis want the Americans to leave,” Newsweek reported in January. And last April, in a demonstration that brought together roughly 300,000 citizens into the streets of Baghdad — mostly Shiites — to mark the second anniversary of Saddam’s downfall, the frequent chants were “No, no to the occupation,” and “No to America, no to Saddam, yes to Islam.” Surely Americans do not know what’s better for Iraq than Iraqis themselves.

The long and short of it is this: The US should set a timetable, declare victory and leave well enough alone.

The bloodbath that many fear would result from a potential civil war does not justify the current bloodbath that is going on under the occupation. The United States’ proven capacity to do harm in Iraq is greater than its realistic expectations of doing good.

Time for Washington to fold its cards, as my friend Patrick O’Donnel bluntly put it.