I haven't written about Iraq recently, because I think those of us who supported this catastrophic invasion should apologise and then have the humility to shut up and reflect on what we have wrought.

According to Amnesty International, torture is as rife today as under the Baathist thugocracy. The Bush administration has used chemical weapons in the heart of a civilian city, Fallujah, after banning all men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving lest they were "enemies of the Iraqi people". Women are being forced to quit their jobs and cover their faces. Iraq is rapidly depopulating as millions flee. And there are now plausible studies suggesting more than 650,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war. That means for every one person who died here on 7/7, more than 10,000 people have died in Iraq.

The Iraqis I speak to every few days are in various stages of denial, despair and terror, lacking the language to describe what is happening to their country. As Jon Stewart asked on The Daily Show, "What do you call it when a hellhole hits a cataclysm?"

But it is worth breaking this silence to make a few points. There are ever-louder whispers from Washington that the Bush administration is considering junking the (very) limited democracy Iraq now has, sacking the Prime Minister, and installing a junta of "national unity" generals to "impose order". These rumours are so advanced that last week, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki felt obliged publicly to ask George Bush for reassurances they were not true. Indeed, the imposition of stringent targets on Maliki from Washington this week rests on this potential coup d'état as a threat: if Maliki fails to meet the targets, what will happen?

This Iraq-needs-a-dictator approach is based on a false analysis of what has gone wrong since the war, one strangely shared by some parts of the anti-war movement. Bush's team now moots installing a strongman, while Piers Morgan, whose Daily Mirror was one of the most prominent voices against the war, has said if he was still in charge of the paper he would be leading one last Iraq campaign: "Bring back Saddam." Their argument is that Iraq is an irredeemably tribal society, always on the brink of fracturing into a Shia-vs-Sunni-vs-Kurd conflagration. This ethnic chaos needs an iron fist to keep it in order - an Arab Tito. Even a sliver of democracy is the problem. Dictatorship is the solution.

But to suggest that the emergence of a violent tribalism in Iraq was the inevitable after-effect of ending Saddamism is to actually let the Bush administration off the hook. It took more than two years - and a huge amount of violence directed by unrepresentative militias, against Shia and Sunni mosques, marketplaces and shrines - for Iraqis to turn on each other in significant numbers. Even now, a large majority of all three Iraqi communities - according to every poll - still believes in a unified Iraq under an elected government.

Tribalism has taken this toxic form because of the total economic collapse of Iraq overseen by Bush. His administration immediately and undemocratically imposed on Iraq the opposite of a Marshall Plan, a deflationary Republican wet dream: privatise everything immediately, impose a flat tax, slash the public sector to pieces. Everywhere this has been tried, from Argentina to Russia, it has led to total economic collapse. Create a situation where unemployment hits 70 per cent and people will look to tribes they barely think about in better times. If only one-third of Brits had jobs and bombs were going off everywhere, we would fracture into warring tribes too. Would we start saying Britain was an irredeemably tribal society that could only be ruled by a dictator?

So the emerging Bushite narrative about Iraq - hey folks, we nobly tried democracy but it turns out they're just too damn tribal and they need a tough guy after all - is wrong and repellent. For people such as Piers Morgan, who have been vindicated on the war and to fall for this now, is a Last-Act tragedy.

Indeed, the Bush administration has been deliberately scuppering attempts to end tribal warfare. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Maliki carefully crafted a 28-point national reconciliation package modelled on post-Apartheid South Africa. Militias would be pardoned, their colleagues released from jail, and their arms handed in. All the major groups expressed interest - but the Bush administration smothered it at birth by refusing to agree to the basic demand of most militias, a timetable for withdrawal of foreign troops.

This withdrawal is inevitable, and soon. The only question is whether our governments leave very quickly of their own choice, or are chased out of the Green Zone like the last helicopters from Saigon. The shape of one possible Bush withdrawal strategy is now becoming clear, and it's not hard to smell the sulphurous influence of Henry Kissinger - who has been outed by Bob Woodward as Bush's new mentor - on it. Install a friendly CIA-backed dictator who will iron out Iraq's creases (no need to ask about the messy tactics, boys) and ensure the oil keeps flowing.

This access to oil supplies was always the primary goal of the Bush team. As long ago as 1991 - back when the only thing George W Bush tortured was the English language - Dick Cheney said about Iraq,: "We're there because the fact of the matter is that part of the world controls the world supply of oil." Wolfowitzian talk of spreading democracy was a sugar-coating, easily burned away.

In opposition to this strategy-of-sorts, many people propose to leave immediately. I have some sympathy for this, but it has a big flaw: the departure would be seen as a victory for the mainly sectarian and fundamentalist resistance groups. It would increase their power and prestige in Iraq's post-war vacuum.

I think there is a better way to achieve a very swift exit. It is for the occupying forces to hold a referendum, within one month, asking the Iraqi people - do you want the foreign troops to remain for another year, or should they leave now? The answer Iraqis will give is pretty obvious: in the latest poll, 82 per cent opted for immediate withdrawal. But if the Iraqi people have a chance to give the purple finger to the occupiers as bravely as they did to the suicide-murderers last year, then the Anglo-American exit will become a victory for them and for the ballot box, not for jihadism. It will maximise their (horribly slim) chances of slowly patching together a more decent country from the militia-splinters into which it has fragmented.

Arguing for this quick democratic exit against the Kissingerian proposals of George Bush might be the last thing we can do for the Iraqi people, along with finally holding our leaders accountable for the crimes - the chemical weapons, the torture - they have committed in the course of this catastrophe.

j.hari@independent.co.uk