The successor to President Bush has a clear-cut choice: Saving lives or saving face.

Bush wants to leave to the next president the burden of ending the
debacle he started five years ago when he ordered the invasion of Iraq
under false pretenses, against a people who had done us no harm.

Bush cannot explain his reasons for the war without compounding his
folly. To this moment, he has not given a logical explanation for his
disastrous militarism.

How can he tell American families that their sons and daughters died
for a terrible, tragic mistake committed by his administration?

History shows that other presidents have found ways to end U.S.
involvement in wars. Most times there has been a public sigh of relief
when that happens.

After 241 Marines and sailors were killed when the U.S. Marine outpost
in Beirut was blown up in October 1983, President Ronald Reagan said
the U.S. would not change its policy.

By April 1984, Reagan had quietly ordered all American forces out of Lebanon.

There were no public recriminations about cutting and running -- only a sense of relief.

Before then, Dwight D. Eisenhower promised during his 1952 presidential
campaign “to go to Korea” and end an unpopular war that had begun in
1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea.

The American people wanted out, so Eisenhower’s message resonated with
voters, and he won the presidency. The war ended in a stalemate with a
divided Korea in 1953 — and there are still some 27,000 American troops
stationed on the peninsula.

Getting out of Vietnam was more difficult.

After years of the low-profile presence of U.S. military advisers
there, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent major American combat units to
Vietnam in 1965, kicking off a huge U.S. investment in the war.

As the war dragged on, Johnson agonized about how to end the conflict.
He fretted over the growing American disillusionment with the war and
the protests in the street, and decided not to seek re-election in 1968
when he realized he could no longer justify the casualties.

Richard M. Nixon was elected as Johnson’s successor and announced that
his plan to end the U.S. involvement in the war was to turn the war
over to the South Vietnamese in 1973. The torturous finale came two
years later when North Vietnamese troops defeated the South Vietnamese
military and captured Saigon.

Author Otto J. Lehrack wrote about the presidential dilemma of Vietnam
in his 2004 book “The First Battle: Operation Starlite and the
Beginning of the Blood Debt in Vietnam.”

Lehrack makes the point that U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam could have
been accomplished easily — without much furor — before August 1965.

But then came the first major Marine battle against the Viet Cong at
Chu Lai. The Americans vanquished the Viet Cong but suffered 54
casualties. The U.S. toll quickly escalated in later months, and by the
end of 1965, American dead in Vietnam totaled 2,385.

From then on, American presidents found it politically, morally and
emotionally difficult to disengage because of what Lehrack calls the
“blood debt” that the U.S. leadership incurred as a result of these
casualties and the thousands that followed.

How could U.S. officials tell the next of kin and the American public that their loved ones died in a futile war?

“How could the American president defend the expenditure of more than
2,000 American lives with nothing to show for it,” the author writes.
America spent another 10 years and more than 56,000 additional lives in
pursuit of the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon policy in Vietnam.

“Like gamblers who already have lost their gambling money, and then the
rent money, and then the car payment, and then the grocery money, and
then borrowed or stole in the hope of changing their luck, the Johnson
and Nixon administrations kept signing markers to America for a debt in
gore that they hoped a reversal of fortune would justify.”

In other words, the United States was getting further in “because it
would be too embarrassing to America’s interests to get out.”

It sounds sadly familiar.

That’s why it’s time now for the Democratic presidential candidates to step up and say we are getting out of Iraq — pronto.

Let’s face it: That country belongs to the Iraqis.

Helen Thomas can be reached at 202-263-6400 or at the e-mail address hthomas@hearstdc.com.