Mr. Speaker and my esteemed colleagues, one of the most grievous blunders in the whole Iraq debacle was the total failure to figure out what we would do after toppling Saddam Hussein. The architects of this war thought that was the whole task. Mission accomplished.

There was no plan for how to manage the aftermath. No plan for keeping the peace in a country with deep sectarian divisions, no plan for how to institute democracy in a society with no democratic infrastructure or institutions. Well, now we see history repeating itself, because The Washington Post reported yesterday that the Bush administration and top military commanders apparently have no idea what the next step is if the troop escalation plan fails, which General Petraeus himself believes probably will.

The Post reports that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Peter Pace, told a meeting of the Nation's Governors: ``I'm a Marine, and Marines don't talk about failure. They talk about victory.''

Well, confidence is one thing. Single mindedness is another, and, frankly, if the Bush national security team had a better track record of smart decisions and strategic successes, I might be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. But as it turns out, these folks have been wrong, very wrong, throughout most of this occupation.

Indeed, when President Bush announced the so-called surge nearly 2 months ago, he essentially conceded that mistakes had been made and not everything his administration has done in Iraq has gone by design.

But as yesterday's Post article points out, we are way beyond plan B. This is more like plan D. There have been many times that we have been told the necessary adjustments are being made to achieve victory, whatever that means, in the context of Iraq.

But here we are, 4 years into this war, still spinning our wheels and nearly 3,200 Americans dead, and the ones who come home in one piece sent to military hospitals that are in deplorable conditions, often delivering substandard care. How many more chances does the Bush administration get to make things right in Iraq? I say: none. There is only one solution: bring our troops home in short order as soon as logistically and safely as possible.

In a way, actually, all the discussion about whether plan A, B, C, D, is, at best, something of a distraction is like arguing about what was the worst part of a root canal. The fact is, the whole Iraq enterprise was fundamentally flawed from the beginning and never should have been launched in the first place. There is not much we can do now to reverse the unforgivable mistake of this Iraq occupation and the unspeakable damages done, but we can do something to ensure it doesn't last a minute longer. We can here in the United States Congress use our Constitutional powers to ensure that not one more family has to lose a son or daughter, a husband or wife, a mother or father for someone else's ideological mess.

It is time, Mr. Speaker. It is time for this tragic chapter in American history to finally end. It is time to bring our troops home.