We have an Op-Ed in the post calling Iraq what it is - a civil war. From Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack on Sunday:

The debate is over: By any definition, Iraq is in a state of civil war. Indeed, the only thing standing between Iraq and a descent into total Bosnia-like devastation is 135,000 U.S. troops -- and even they are merely slowing the fall. The internecine conflict could easily spiral into one that threatens not only Iraq but also its neighbors throughout the oil-rich Persian Gulf region with instability, turmoil and war.
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For all the recent attention on the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, far more people died in Iraq over the past month than in Israel and Lebanon, and tens of thousands have been killed from the fighting and criminal activity since the U.S. occupation began. Additional signs of civil war abound. Refugees and displaced people number in the hundreds of thousands. Militias continue to proliferate. The sense of being an "Iraqi" is evaporating.

Yet our leaders, who are either insane, deluded, or just plain liars, refuse to acknowledge the problem and deal with it. This is an excellent and very thorough article however, covering this issue from every angle to try to find a solution to the problem, rather than just mock our leadership for thier inability to come to grips with a crisis. Still the solution seems bleak.

That point is critical: Ending an all-out civil war typically requires overwhelming military power to nail down a political settlement. It took 30,000 British troops to bring the Irish civil war to an end, 45,000 Syrian troops to conclude the Lebanese civil war, 50,000 NATO troops to stop the Bosnian civil war, and 60,000 to do the job in Kosovo. Considering Iraq's much larger population, it probably would require 450,000 troops to quash an all-out civil war there. Such an effort would require a commitment of enormous military and economic resources, far in excess of what the United States has already put forth.

It's a question now of whether we acknowledge the problem and take steps to correct it (however politically unpopular that would be), or abandon this endeavor and establish a protectorate to keep the Kurds from being overrun by their insane southern countrymen. It's a tough call, clearly more than Bush can handle, since he won't even recognize the problem.