The US-led effort in Iraq has reached its most critical point since the invasion began just over a year ago.

The fierce fighting this week between major religious factions and American soldiers could be more critical to the eventual outcome than even the largely-symbolic fall of Baghdad and the capture of Saddam Hussein.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld calls it "a test of will." But it's also a test of US military preparedness and capability, coalition unity, reconstruction and nation-building efforts, and the Bush administration's exit strategy (starting with the planned handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government 10 weeks from now).

Other factors are even more unclear. The strength and motives of opposing factions in Iraq, and the involvement of other countries - principally Iran - in resisting the US administration, are difficult to gauge, as is US public opinion as the nation moves towards its first wartime presidential election in a generation.

What are the Bush administration's options?

According to a range of experts, it largely hinges on whether one believes the invasion was a good idea in the first place.

The rebellion instigated by radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr "is less a political movement than ... [a manifestation of] the flocking of disenfranchised young men to charismatic leaders who promise them some power and a place in society," says Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. "It's not a new story, and not a hard impulse for well-trained US troops to contain," says Mr. Thompson.

But trying to contain well-armed Shiites (as well as Sunni Muslims) willing to fight the greatest military force on earth puts the Bush administration in a bind.

"If US forces respond too weakly, they will embolden both sets of insurgents," says military analyst Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. "If they respond muscularly - [which is] the US military's, particularly the Army's, natural response and the goal of the insurgents - they risk inflaming the entire population."

The US bomb and rocket attack Wednesday on a mosque used by armed insurgents may be legal under the Geneva Convention rules of war. But it makes for poor public relations, even among Iraqi civilians happy to have been liberated from the Hussein regime.

Dr. Eland's suggestion is to partition the country along ethnic and factional lines -- Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish - and withdraw in an orderly but deliberate fashion.

That seems unlikely for a variety of reasons, particularly given the administration's ultimate goal of creating a democratic, unified Iraq.

But the fierce urban combat involving two of those factions could make that goal elusive. The recent backlash of the Shiite faction led by Sadr, some experts worry, could have broader consequences for the whole region.

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