OK. Our Don Quixote-like charge into Iraq hasn't exactly gone well. In fact, it's been what the GI's call a SNAFU (Situation Normal: All F---ed Up) from Alpha to Zulu (the beginning to the end of the military alphabet). For complete in-depth details on just how this was achieved you could read the last three years or so of this column, or buy a copy of Thomas Ricks' new book "FIASCO: The American Military Adventure in Iraq."

The Decider and his vice president (the enemy is in "the last throes") and his secretary of defense steadfastly continue to ignore the reality of the situation and counsel that if only we stay the course we'll achieve victory and implant democracy in the heart of the Middle East.

That makes it hard for those who know better to make any change for the better, and it makes it hard for people to figure out what's true and what's not, or whether they even care.

So what's new lately in Iraq?

A joint American-Iraqi task force stages a night raid on Shiite Muslim militiamen who are suspected of kidnapping, torturing and slaughtering Sunnis in Baghdad in the opening moves of the newest effort to take back control of Baghdad - and the prime minister of the new, democratic government promptly denounces the action.

Tens of thousands of our Shiite allies filled the streets of Baghdad to support Hezbollah and its actions that triggered the latest carnage in Lebanon.

Iraqi officials acknowledge something that's been true since shortly after U.S. forces toppled the Saddam Hussein government three and a half years ago: Iran has Revolutionary Guards and other military, paramilitary and covert operatives in Iraq.

Other Iraqi officials have begun saying that it may become necessary to carve up the country into three separate nations - Kurdistan with the oilfields and the rivers in the north; a Shiite-dominated Shiastan allied with Iran in the south, with its oil fields; and a Sunni nation north and west of Baghdad. The capital, meanwhile, would be divided into Shiite east Baghdad and Sunni west Baghdad.

The list of problems with this, starting with how the Sunni nation would support itself and whether Iraq's Sunni neighbors would accept such a carve-up or funnel more support to their Sunni insurgent brethren, is endless.

Meanwhile, Iraq's accelerating civil war, or sectarian violence if you can't bring yourself to accept reality, is still claiming a hundred or more lives every single day as mad bombers on both sides blow up weddings, funerals and market places and snatch the innocent off the streets and out of the shops, torture them with electric drills and then cut off their heads.

And back home, Army and Marine divisions and brigades get the word that they're on their way back to Iraq for their third or fourth deployment. More than 3,500 soldiers of the 172nd Stryker Brigade, who were within a week of heading home after a hard year patrolling Mosul, got the word that instead they were being extended for an additional four months to try to secure Baghdad's 6 million fractious citizens.

A scholarly report says the debate over the Iraq War has divided the American people even more than the Vietnam War, with hard-liners believing everything the administration says - even those things proved to be untrue, like Saddam's WMD and nuclear threat - while the opposition seethes with undisguised fury at Bush and friends.

An op-ed columnist in The New York Times reports that the American people are tuning out the news from Iraq, and the television networks are obliging them by cutting back on coverage of the news. Those who do read and watch and worry about the situation ask: Well, what the Hell are we going to do to fix this mess?

The pundits say we've got three choices:

-Stay the course with the president and his merry band.

-Cut and run (Karl Rove's description of any plan for a withdrawal).

-Send in an additional 150,000 American troops to reinforce the 130,000 already there, try harder to secure the place and spend an additional $50 billion or so to finish the reconstruction jobs on which we've already wasted $18 billion of our money and uncounted billions of Iraqi oil revenues.

If you can't find an attractive solution from that list, you aren't alone.

The alternatives and the obvious outcome are so depressing that it makes one wonder if Dick Cheney owns stock in pharmaceuticals. Actually, that's more likely to be Donald H. Rumsfeld. Sorry Dick.

Meantime, the death toll among Iraqis and American troops rises by the day, and that will continue until someone wakes up in Washington and forces a change in the course.