Come clean Mr. President!

No, this is not a plea for a scandal-driven mea culpa or for the Bush administration to release a ream of missing or subpoenaed documents. This is a cry for something more important. For as I am writing this, 74 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq since the day the statues fell in Baghdad.

Recently, one of these soldiers was a man shot at close range near the University of Baghdad, and that story in particular broke my heart. I’ve just returned from Iraq and knew the very spot where he had been murdered.

The brutal fact is that overall combat losses are now beginning to approach those of Gulf War I. In short, we may have won a war only to be losing the peace. What to do?

The stakes as measured in the lives of our children are too high to permit a mean partisan advantage. Instead, President Bush needs to stop denying what’s happening in Iraq and come clean with the American people. The brutal, cowardly assassinations of unsuspecting American soldiers have increased in frequency, and just as frighteningly, increased in sophistication and coordination.

The CIA, while hedging its bets, more or less conceded that the voice on an audio tape recently played on Al-Jazeera quite probably belonged to Saddam Hussein. It’s likely that Saddam, and his evil progeny, sons Uday and Qusay are directing some of this activity using the billions they stole.

The president needs to report to the American people, and he needs to do it quickly and candidly. He needs to explain to the people not only what’s been going on in Iraq but also what is likely to happen in the months – and yes – years ahead. Having spent weeks in Iraq talking to scores of both Iraqi citizens and American soldiers, here’s what the president needs to say:

American soldiers are stretched way too thin. You might be able to win a war “on the cheap” but you can’t skimp on the costs of occupation. More troops is the answer. I’ve talked to plenty of Iraqis and trust me, as long as they believe that Saddam is still out there, fewer and fewer of them will bet on an American-led reconstruction. The Iraqis aren’t ungrateful – they’re just terrified.

Not only are more troops required but different sorts of troops. The president needs to set aside old scores and persuade our European, Asian and Muslim allies to make substantial contributions to the occupation force. He needs to explain this simple fact to the American people – that the more the occupation looks American, the bloodier it’s going to be.

The bottom line here is that, put bluntly, President Bush and his advisors made a monumental misjudgment about the occupation that would be necessary. The original strategy, designed to croak Saddam as quickly as possible, called for the lightning deployment of armor, preceded and supported by air power, to move on Baghdad without getting bogged down in the various cities and regions en route. Consequently, major towns and cities were bypassed or mopped up only cursorily. The result of this gross error was on a par with allowing Osama bin Laden to slip through our hands in Afghanistan by entrusting the battle of Tora Bora to Afghan troops – in Iraq, Saddam’s Ba’athist Party network of loyalists still has not been dissolved.

Saying that hindsight is 20/20 is no defense. Remember the gray-haired men with stars on their soldiers and decades of experience who warned the president before the war? The recently retired U.S. Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki waged a monumental battle of his own, trying to persuade Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Assistant Secretary Paul Wolfowitz that more troops were needed for stabilization – many more troops. Gen Shinseki lost that battle, and one result has been more American blood spilled in Iraq. Perhaps the Bush Doctrine would have been better served under the advice of a career soldier with extensive peacekeeping experience versus the predictions of a couple of defense techno geniuses. Does the name McNamara ring a bell?

And now President Bush has to step up and explain to the American people what is to be done. I don’t expect any mea culpas – that’s too much to ask of any politician – but he’s got to explain to us what’s gone wrong and how he’s going to fix it. And smarmy, Yalie eating-club bravado like, “Bring ’em on” isn’t going to cut it. The people, whose kids are expected to be doing most of the dying in Iraq, deserve something better.

I’ll tell you what the president owes our troops in Iraq. If our uniformed men and women are prepared to take the risk of getting their heads blown off by some Ba’athist cutthroat, then the president ought to have enough courage to stand up before the American people and explain what the long-term security plan is for our troops and those Iraqis who might consider standing with us.

There’s no photo-op here, but for Bush to stand up and level with the country will require more courage than say, riding a jet onto an aircraft carrier.