If you're a Fort Carson soldier's family, you may be wondering what went wrong. You may ask yourself how to fix this mess in Iraq. You know you, your family and your friends have suffered terrible losses of life and limb in the Iraqi quagmire. You probably want the United States to finish the job it started, but wonder how that will happen.

The White House is also surely wondering what went wrong. We went into Iraq as "liberators", freeing a brutalized population from a wretched dictator. It was, in Bush Administration minds, a "just" war to rid the world of a dangerous ruler. Nonetheless, the Administration misled us to start a terrible, and probably needless, war. Iraq wasn't al-Qaeda. It wasn't an imminent threat to the United States. It wasn't a big player in international terrorism. But, now it is all the above. And, those people we "liberated"? They despise us.

It's not surprising that an occupied country wants to get rid of its occupiers. It all seemed easy to explain when it was the evil Saddamists in the Sunni Triangle who were ambushing our soldiers. But now, it's also the Shi'ites, whom we supposedly freed from Saddam's repression, rising violently against us. It's time to rethink what the risks are in Iraq and what we do about them.

Above all, we risk a debacle where Americans continue to die from roadside bombs and urban snipers and frantic mobs. We risk the humiliation of being unable to finish the job we started, a hasty departure, leaving our friends on the ground to suffer torture and death on our behalf. We learned that lesson in Vietnam. Or so we thought.

We also risk having another large, fundamentalist, Islamic state, just like Iran, that opposes everything we stand for. Iraq, for all its horrors, was a secular state where women had rights and al-Qaeda was not welcome. Today, we have chaos, a US administration that hopes to turn over political control-to what? To a moderate Islamic governing body? Or to a radical, fundamentalist, anti-American band of Islamic clerics? If we do not maintain a large military presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future, we are likely to have a virulently anti-American, fundamentalist government that is truly a threat to our safety.

What if you're an Iraqi woman? How frightening is it to see that those who incite the mobs, who inflame anti-American hatred, are also those who believe women are chattel, with minimal human rights? How would you feel about the American "liberation" if you were a woman facing ridicule, terror and subservience, facing an inhumanity that women in Afghanistan and Iran see every day?

It's time to face reality. How ludicrous for the White House to say we will respond to the vicious uprising "at a time and place of our choosing." Or to repeat mindlessly that we have enough troops to manage the chaos. We need leadership, not nonsense. First, we must have enough troops to protect our soldiers who are trying to stabilize Iraq. When you don't know who will blow himself up, and you along with him, you can't trust anyone but your fellow soldiers. You must know there are enough of you there. Next, we must bring Iraqis with us. We must be able to guarantee Iraq's security. We must fulfill our promises to rebuild a devastated country. We must build trust in the midst of rage. So far, we haven't been able to persuade the most popular leaders of our goodwill. We will have to bring them into the leadership of a new Iraq while providing for a democratic system that embraces the entire population, including women.

We can't do this without a broader base of international support, which we should have had from the beginning. We can only hope to persuade the United Nations to help us build a new nation. Our failure in Vietnam cost us a generation of distrust. A failure in Iraq will cost us our national security. It's time to discard the platitudes. We cannot afford to fail this time.