I STILL REMEMBER when I read a New York Times news story in February 1997 that left me shaken. Tapes of phone conversations made by President Lyndon B. Johnson had just been released. It turns out that in 1964, Johnson already knew that the United States could win the battles, but not the war, in Vietnam.

Johnson called the war"the biggest damn mess I ever saw" and said,"I don't think it's worth fighting for and I don't think we can get out." Though he viewed the war as pointless, he -- like all sitting presidents -- was unwilling to lose the war on his watch."They'd impeach a president...that would run out, wouldn't they?" he asked. Johnson also spoke emotionally about endangering American soldiers in Vietnam."It just makes the chills run up my back," he said to Sen. Richard B. Russell, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Russell responded,"It does me, too. We're in the quicksands up to our neck, and I just don't know what the hell to do about it."

For 10 years, Vietnam shadowed my student life. I believed the war was morally wrong; I thought it was unwinnable. But until I read that story, I never imagined that Johnson knew it as well.

Today, we are faced with a similar conundrum. The United States can win the battles, but it cannot win the war in Iraq. History teaches us that no occupation can last indefinitely. People are humiliated -- not only by depraved and violent interrogations as happened at Abu Ghraib prison -- but by the mere fact of being occupied. They inevitably resist.

Many people in Washington surely know that the war in Iraq is unwinnable and that, sooner or later, the United States will have to leave. As a sitting president, however, George W. Bush, who promoted a unilateralist pre-emptive foreign policy, is not likely to concede defeat and lose the war in Iraq on his watch.

That is why Sen. John Kerry must offer an alternative. As Bush's Democratic challenger, he has to pledge that if he's elected president, he will end the war by calling upon the international community to help Iraq hold early elections and by setting a date for an orderly and phased withdrawal of American troops.

If Kerry refuses to do that, then he, too, could turn into a sitting president who would also be reluctant to lose a war on his watch.

Why should the occupation end? Because WMDs have never been found, which was the reason the president said it was necessary to invade Iraq. Because Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's incompetent planning sent too few troops to prevent widespread looting or to maintain electricity and the water supply. Because this was a war of choice, not of necessity. Because most of the Iraqi population now views Americans as occupiers, rather than as liberators. Because photographs revealing brutal and humiliating atrocities committed against Iraqi prisoners have shredded American moral credibility. Because the U.S. occupation of Iraq has provided al Qaeda terrorists with powerful propaganda for recruiting new suicide bombers and for justifying their barbaric act of beheading an American civilian.

This is not a time to gloat at Bush's self-inflicted disaster. Nor is it a time to escalate into a cycle of revenge that may very well end up killing Americans on our own soil.

It is time to set things right. As New York Times columnist David Brooks has wisely suggested, we have to be prepared to permit the Iraqi people"to have a victory over us. For us to succeed in Iraq, we have to lose." Neither radical insurgents nor an American puppet government will create stability in Iraq. We must allow -- even encourage -- moderate Iraqis to express their resistance to the occupation and to prevail in Iraqi elections.

The idea of democracy spreading throughout the Middle East is still a noble idea, but, as Jonathan Schell, author of"The Unconquerable World" (Cosmopolitan, 2003) has written,"democracy cannot be shipped to Iraq on a tanker or a C-5A. It is a homegrown construct, which must flow from the will of the people involved. The expression of that will is, in fact, what democracy is."

For democracy to have a chance, the United States must withdraw its troops, leave no military base in Iraq and not try to control that nation's oil policy. The United States must also pressure Israel to commit to a clear timetable to create a coherent Palestinian state. This is a precondition for peace in the Middle East.

It's an act of patriotism to call for an end to the occupation. President Bush has damaged our national reputation and undermined our democratic ideals and traditions. To paraphrase a poignant question posed by a young John Kerry: How do you ask a soldier to be the last person to die in Iraq?

This article was first published in the San Francisco Chronicle and is reprinted with permission.