With the American media and politicos obsessed about the election, it was hard last week to avoid the topic of Iraq-though many Democratic officeholders and candidates still, bizarrely, try. But it was on everyone's mind. Every poll and analysis shows the catastrophe of Iraq to be this year's top election issue. And a desperate Republican chatter machine spent much of last week trying (with some success) to convince the country that rather than simply being unable to tell a joke well, John Kerry (who is running for nothing) hates the troops.

And now, the chattering classes are all abuzz over the preordained sentencing of Saddam Hussein, for crimes now dwarfed by those of George W. Bush.

Virtually nobody in this political and media circus has been actually suggesting what the U.S. should now do in Iraq.

Not to worry. Half a world away, buried in the news by the Saddam kabuki and our other domestic election fetishes, Iraqis themselves are busy deciding all that for us.

Patrick Cockburn, from "Baghdad Is Under Siege" in the 11-1-06 [UK] Independent:

Sunni insurgents have cut the roads linking [Baghdad] to the rest of Iraq. The country is being partitioned as militiamen fight bloody battles for control of towns and villages north and south of the capital. ... Well-armed Sunni tribes now largely surround Baghdad and are fighting Shia militias to complete the encirclement.

Note the complete absence of U.S. troops from Cockburn's (or anyone else's) account of these battles. It was only a couple of weeks ago that the U.S. command admitted the failure of its plan to encircle Baghdad-with checkpoints and a ludicrous "trench," intended to keep fighters and weapons from entering the city, or leaving the city, or something. Now we learn that Sunni insurgents have finished the job for us, just as Sunni and Shiite militias now control most of the country outside the largely autonomous Kurdish north. The U.S. controls ... well ... the Green Zone, and a few bases it would rather not venture far from.

In Sunni Anbar province, home of Fallujah, Ramadi, and other long-running centers of resistance, the U.S. military and the nominal Iraqi government have no control at all. From Fallujah, Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily, in this Oct. 31 dispatch with Inter Press Service, quote a senior leader of the Arab National Movement: "The U.S. embassy has [no] real control [over the country], as long as there are resistance fighters who are firmly holding the Iraqi streets in Sunni areas, and militias with their death squads controlling the rest of the country as well as the huge oil market."

The same Fallujah story grimly noted that the U.S. military, responding to its failure in Anbar, has unleashed a harsh new campaign of violence, directed, residents claim, largely at the civilian population. It also includes this quote from a Ramadi teacher: "Every one who fights the American occupation has our full support. [The Americans] lied to us all the time, and it is time for them to admit their terrible failure and leave. Let them go rebuild New Orleans."

Then there was this sobering tidbit last week, from the 10-31-06 Washington Post:

"The U.S. Air Force is asking the Pentagon's leadership for a staggering $50 billion in emergency funding for fiscal 2007-an amount equal to nearly half its annual budget. ... [A] source familiar with the Air Force plans said the extra funds would help pay to transport growing numbers of U.S. soldiers being killed and wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan."

That's a lot of American bodies.

Meanwhile, Bechtel, the second-largest U.S contractor in Iraq (after Halliburton), led the list of U.S.-based companies that announced last week that they are pulling operations out of Iraq. In Bechtel's words, continuing work in Iraq is simply "too dangerous." What happens to Donald Rumsfeld's privatized military when the private contractors run a cost/benefit analysis and decide there's no money to be made from having their asses kicked?

That, truly, is the bottom line. The U.S. has been finding creative ways, despite and because of its overwhelming force, to lose this war since the day it arrived. It's been a 44-month clusterfuck, and counting.

Until early this year, that has meant largely that the U.S. and its Iraqi allies have been unable to establish full control. But while a low-grade civil war was already under way, the sectarian violence unleashed by the Feb. 22 Samarra mosque bombing changed everything. That was the point at which Iraq seriously began separating into tribes. Those tribes and their militias became, over the course of this year, Iraqis' primary means of seeking security from the violence.

Patrick Cockburn again:

[Baghdad] itself has broken up into a dozen or more hostile districts, the majority of which are controlled by the main Shia militia, the Mehdi Army. The scale of killing is already as bad as Bosnia at the height of the Balkans conflict.

The American public knows the war in Iraq is a disaster. This election has turned, in large part, on its desire to hold the war's architects and enablers accountable.

But absolutely nobody in America's political class this election season is confronting the cold reality of what must now be done in Iraq, and done immediately: the United States must get the hell out of Iraq. Somebody else-like, the rest of the world, starting with the United Nations and the Arab League-needs to step into the humanitarian crisis and even incipient genocide now unraveling in Iraq. Nobody on the world stage can even seriously contemplate this, however, until the United States gets out of the way. This is what America must do, immediately-along with ponying up a large chunk of money for Iraq's stabilization and reconstruction by other people, money which would still be far less than we're currently spending to make things worse. The time for war profiteering and domestic political games regarding Iraq is over.

Virtually nobody in the Beltway is thinking along these lines. The Bush administration isn't about to propose it. James Baker's Iraq Study Group is still studying the idea that things are going badly. Leading Democrats are almost all either afraid of being seen as "soft" on military matters, or trying to avoid the topic entirely.

What's left is us, the American public. And if we don't raise our voices-during and after this election-Iraqis themselves will make all this moot.

Maybe rebuilding New Orleans isn't such a bad idea.