A hard week in a long Iraq mission

But Hammes says the most important change to be made now is in the way that American leaders talk to the people about what's going on in Iraq. He says history shows that most insurgencies, whether the Vietnamese against the French and later the US, or the Afghans against the Soviets, last from 10 to 30 years.

He says he sees no reason why Iraq is any different, but worries the American public was ill-prepared for this by the rosy Administration pronouncements for most of the war.

"This isn't pessimistic, but realistic,'' says Hammes. The type of insurgency the US is fighting "is about directly attacking the will of our decision makers, and in America that's the voters."

A joint ABC/Washington Post poll released Monday showed this strategy is apparently working. The poll found 56 percent of Americans now feel the war is not worth its costs, a record high and up from 49 percent in July.

Hammes points to the Mosul attack, while tragic, as more important in terms of what it does to American views of the war than it is in military terms, since insurgent successes are to be expected.

"That's not a military target; it's just another way to get the insurgent message out that this war is too long, too hard, too difficult to win,'' he says. "The single toughest thing is sustaining the will of the American people, the only way to do that is to lay out all the costs and get them to stay in and commit."

But to some analysts, the view from inside Iraq has grown so dim that they advocate a radical shift in approach and expectations of what success could mean.

Steps once potentially capable of turning the situation around "in all likelihood" would now fail, the ICG says in its new report. "If the [Bush] administration does not take the measure of what has changed ... it may well meet its desired end-date, but at the cost of a highly dangerous end-state." The US hopes Iraq will adopt a new constitution and elect a full legislature by the end of 2005.

"Part of the effort has to be to redefine what success means,'' says Malley at ICG. "The original notion that Iraq was going to be a model for the region, of open government, of a liberal, free-market economy, isn't an achievable goal anymore."

Malley and the ICG say the US should make every effort to withdraw troops to bases and get away from heavy-handed counterinsurgency because it appears to be counterproductive. Instead, Iraqi anger at the US has grown so high that the best thing America could do for the government that comes in after the January elections is to allow it to go its own way, Malley says.

"The US may have to allow the government coming in to distance itself from the party that could hurt the legitimacy the most, including to withdrawing troops if that is what they ask for,'' says Malley. "In the past this would have been viewed as a failure for US policy, but now perhaps it has to be seen as a necessary element of success because it would at least preserve, hopefully, a unified country and a government that's seen as legitimate by its people."

Malley says worries that that the January elections could exacerbate tensions between Shiites and Sunnis, and therefore "do more harm than good."

"It's about minimizing harm at this point, for both the Iraqis and US strategic interests,'' he says.

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