Think it's bad in Iraq? It's worse.

Newsweek paints a devastating portrait of the deteriorating situation in Iraq.

It's not only that U.S. casualty figures keep climbing. American counterinsurgency experts are noticing some disturbing trends in those statistics. The Defense Department counted 87 attacks per day on U.S. forces in August?the worst monthly average since Bush's flight-suited visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003. Preliminary analysis of the July and August numbers also suggests that U.S. troops are being attacked across a wider area of Iraq than ever before. And the number of gunshot casualties apparently took a huge jump in August. Until then, explosive devices and shrapnel were the primary cause of combat injuries, typical of a "phase two" insurgency, where sudden ambushes are the rule. (Phase one is the recruitment phase, with most actions confined to sabotage. That's how things started in Iraq.) Bullet wounds would mean the insurgents are standing and fighting?a step up to phase three.

Another ominous sign is the growing number of towns that U.S. troops simply avoid. A senior Defense official objects to calling them "no-go areas." "We could go into them any time we wanted," he argues. The preferred term is "insurgent enclaves." They're spreading. Counterinsurgency experts call it the "inkblot strategy": take control of several towns or villages and expand outward until the areas merge. The first city lost to the insurgents was Fallujah, in April. Now the list includes the Sunni Triangle cities of Ar Ramadi, Baqubah and Samarra, where power shifted back and forth between the insurgents and American-backed leaders last week. "There is no security force there [in Fallujah], no local government," says a senior U.S. military official in Baghdad. "We would get attacked constantly. Forget about it."

When Francis Fukayama, neocon extraordinaire, gets shrill, you know that things are pretty damned awful.

The Republican convention outrageously lumped the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war into a single, seamless war on terrorism - as if the soldiers fighting Mr Sadr were avenging the destroyers of the twin towers... mismanagement of the war has created a new Afghanistan inside Iraq.... The Bush administration has made any number of foreign policy errors, particularly over Iraq.... But if Mr Bush is returned... the administration will have got away a Big Lie about the war on terrorism and will have little incentive to engage in serious review....

Even the Financial Times, that paragon of conservativism, is saying it's time to end the occupation.

An unknown number of mostly civilian Iraqis, certainly not less than 10,000 and possibly three times that number, have perished, and hundreds more are dying each week. After an invasion and occupation that promised them freedom, Iraqis have seen their security evaporate, their state smashed and their country fragment into a lawless archipelago ruled by militias, bandits and kidnappers.

The transitional political process, designed to lead to constituent assembly and general elections next year, has been undermined because the nervous U.S.-dominated occupation authority has insisted on hand-picking various permutations of interim Iraqi governors, mostly exiles or expatriates with no standing among their people. Whatever Iraqis thought about the Americans on their way in?and it was never what these émigré politicians told Washington they would be thinking?an overwhelming majority now views US forces as occupiers rather than liberators and wants them out.

The time has therefore come to consider whether a structured withdrawal of US and remaining allied troops, in tandem with a workable handover of security to Iraqi forces and a legitimate and inclusive political process, can chart a path out of the current chaos.

That's a pleasant thought, but by all accounts, a stable and effective Iraqi security force is eight to twelve months away (and by "effective," I mean, "doesn't hand over his gun to the insurgents"). A "structured withdrawal" doesn't seem possible right now.

But we do need to change the people who are in charge. I just hope Kerry is listening to the advice of Paul Krugman this morning.

On the other side of the fold is David Brooks, a bold supporter of the war and the Bush administration (and despiser of Kerry's mythical inability to make up his mind). Brooks proclaims that there are two choices for moving forward in Iraq. If I'm reading him correctly they are not Bad versus Worse. They are Worse. Versus. Worse. Oh, but he concludes that everything will be okay if we just give Allawi a chance to succeed! Brooks had me worried for a second. I thought he was going to say something treasonous.