Stay the course is out. Adjusting tactics is in. Insurgency is fading. Civil war appears to have arrived.
Withdraw troops? Increase troops? A phased withdrawal? A stated timetable? Stick with al-Maliki's government? Look for new leadership?
The future of Iraq and the United States' mission there is as murky as Baghdad in the midst of a sandstorm.
Still, something fundamental is going to change no matter how deeply President Bush appears to dig in his heels.
A new Congress, with Democrats swept into leadership on a wave of dissatisfaction with the war, takes its seat next month. A new secretary of defense is about to take office as generals in the Pentagon rethink tactics. A study group of Washington wise men is about to release its already leaked findings. The White House has its own review coming to conclusions.
Many of those who study Iraq agree: The United States faces many choices there, none of them good ones.
"All of the options have real big downsides," says Francis Fukuyama of the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.
With each tick of the clock, those options seem to get more limited. The inevitable outcome many foresee is a country, still far from peaceful, divided along sectarian lines.
But getting from here to there is a difficult task.
"What should America do now? Frankly, I haven't the foggiest," says Thabit Abdullah, an Iraqi in the history department at York University in Toronto.
"I have no answers," echoes Waleed Hazbun, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins who studies the Middle East. "And I am very skeptical of anyone who does, to be honest."
Steven David, a security expert in Hopkins' political science department, agrees: "I don't know anyone outside of the Bush administration who thinks this is going to end well. At best we can finesse a dignified exit.
"The notion of Iraq being transformed into anything remotely resembling a liberal democracy is gone," David says. "The question now is how we can leave in a way that preserves some credibility and doesn't make things much worse for our interests in the region and the world."
Bottom line: The only thing certain about Iraq is uncertainty. Any vision of that country's future is going to be murky, but one that starts to come into focus has it looking a bit like Lebanon, with strong undertones of Bosnia.
That's because, like Humpty Dumpty, Iraq has fallen off its secular wall and broken into its religious and ethnic components - Sunni, Shiite and Kurd. It is not going to be put back together again.
So, this argument goes, the Bush administration should quit getting Americans and Iraqis killed in that vain struggle. Instead, it should recognize that the only hope for stability is for the country to separate into three regions.
"These would not necessarily be formal states, just Kurd- and Sunni- and Shiite-dominated regions," David says. "Perhaps the capital in Baghdad would remain multi-ethnic and there would be some arrangement for oil-revenue sharing, and the hope would be that would provide some sort of basis for stability by which we could leave."
Fukuyama terms this "a soft partition."
"It is very costly. There are still an awful lot of people around Baghdad and in the south who would have to move," he says. "The question is where can we get some sort of international legitimization for what amounts to ethnic cleansing, which, hopefully, could be done nonviolently."
This is something of a vision of Bosnia, a place where, like Iraq, the several ethnic groups - Serbs, Croats and Muslims - had lived together peacefully for generations. Many thought that they could continue that way. But once security broke down, people retreated into their ethnic groupings and the civil war was on.
In Iraq, two of those groupings would have foreign sponsors - Iran for the Shia and Syria for the Sunni (the Kurds have achieved stability in the north on their own). And so this vision becomes like Lebanon, where those same two countries have a similar influence over similar ethnicities.
That arrangement keeps the country relatively stable with a balance of tension, while in the capital, Beirut, there is at least the pretense of a unified democratic government. The same dynamic could bring some sort of stability to Iraq, without, one hopes, the 15 years of civil war it took to get there in Lebanon.
"The Sunnis have got to accept that they are not the owners of Iraq," says Karol Soltan of the University of Maryland's government and politics department. "One way to do that is the Lebanese way, 15 years of brutal civil war. On the other hand, it is relatively amazing that the South African whites gave it up peacefully. So you've got two models."
In this vision of Iraq's future, Baghdad would be a Potemkin village of a multi-ethnic Iraq, in reality also ethnically divided by neighborhood and heavily policed to keep the peace.
But this Iraq would be relatively weak and prone to interference by its neighbors. So getting them on board would be paramount. That would mean talking to the major players, Iran and Syria, either above or below board, something the Bush administration has said it will not do.
"I think all are in favor of opening channels to Syria and Iran," Fukuyama says. "But we've got such a weak hand I don't see what we can offer them to make them want to help us pull our chestnuts out of the fires."
About the only card that the United States has left to play in that diplomatic game is the threat of a chaotic failed state on their border if they don't help enforce some form of stability.
"I think we need to think of the big picture in Iraq," says Hazbun. "We need to think about regional stability, about the fact that we lived with Lebanon as a failed state for many years and needed to bring about some kind of regional order to stabilize it.
"That's what we have to do in Iraq, not allow it to be the basis for the fighting of proxy wars, leading to further instability," he says.
One of the debates about Iraq is how to define its condition - a strong state dealing with an insurgency, a nation engulfed in a civil war or, even worse, a failed state that has ceded control to a confusing melange of armed groups, some political, some ethnic, some criminal.
That might seem to be a semantic argument, but not to Soltan, who consulted with the Kurds during the writing of the new Iraqi constitution.
"I have decided after thinking about this for months, that the fight over whether this is a civil war or not actually matters," he says. "It makes a difference because the range of policies that are seriously considered is quite different if you think of it as a civil war.
"For instance, high on the list now is trying to take the arms away from the militias," Soltan says. "But if you think of it as a civil war, you don't start urging the two armies to give up their arms, you go for a cease-fire, a separation of forces, all kinds of possibilities."
This would be an acknowledgment that Iraq has divided itself along ethnic lines. That acknowledgment - whether spoken or tacit - would lead the United States to adopt tactics that would seek peace among those ethnicities, abandoning politics aimed at ensuring that such divisions are not part of the new Iraq.
Left unanswered in this vision of Iraq is the role of U.S. forces. Bottom line - should they stay or should they go?
"I think the United States must begin to cede more and more power to local authorities in Iraq," Abdullah says. "And, even though it is extremely risky, withdraw more and more American troops."
He says the opposite - increasing troop levels - would have helped right after the invasion, but not now.
"It is very risky, but believe it or not, many Iraqis, even those who are secular-minded and democracy-minded, who long suffered under Saddam, are saying, 'Perhaps we shouldn't be too scared of the notion of America leaving because the presence of America hasn't done anything'," Abdullah says.
A withdrawal would also raise the specter of total chaos in the country, getting the attention of Iran and Syria, who are probably quite content with the current situation, fomenting just enough violence in Iraq to keep America militarily occupied but not enough for the place to totally fall apart.
"The trouble is that Iran probably figures that they can keep the pot boiling at some controllable level and keep bleeding us," Fukuyama says. "That is not a bad outcome for them."
With no U.S. troops there, that strategy would no longer be bleeding the U.S.
But, like Iran and Syria, the United States does not want to see Iraq totally fall apart, with power in the hands of a mixture of criminal and military groups that form along ethnic and political fault lines. This is the recipe for a failed state, a terrorist haven, and all the other things that invading Iraq was supposed to prevent. There is a fear that an abrupt troop withdrawal could lead to that.
Still, David sees no alternative to U.S. troops leaving. "America has got itself into the midst of a domestic fight. Police will tell you that the one thing they hate the most is to go into a domestic disturbance," he says.
Fukuyama would like to see the country moving toward stable divisions before the troops come out. Without central government control, he says, "we cannot get out until there is an alternative equilibrium to turn to."
If there are moves toward some sort of partition, he could see troops leaving in a year or so.
Soltan, too, says troops need to stay for a while, though with a shift in mission that recognizes the division of the country. "It seems to me that U.S. withdrawal now is more likely to do a lot of damage, both locally and to the U.S. reputation," he says.
Abdullah says U.S. troop withdrawal is a touchy question.
"I've changed my opinion a million times on the issue of American troop withdrawal, but I am now convinced that America is part of the problem, not the solution," he says. "I am really worried about America withdrawing, but I do not see any alternative. I never thought America would be such an incompetent colonizer."
A refugee from Hussein's rule who backed his overthrow, Abdullah once considered moving back to Iraq. Now, he says, he cannot even visit because it puts his relatives in danger of kidnapping if people know there is a relative in Canada who might be able to pay a ransom.
"What is really amazing is that despite all of this, the country still functions to a certain extent," he says. "The economy is not that bad. There are jobs. Factories are working. It's mind-boggling.
"It is testimony to the incredible potential of this country, if it were not for two people - Saddam and Bush."
michael.hill@baltsun.com