Did you read the George Packer piece in New Yorker? That esssay earns a Silver Star, at least. But don't expect it to make you feel good about the situation. His reporting is impressive. Here's a sample:

A reporter for the military newspaper Stars & Stripes had heard a bewildered sergeant near Tikrit ask his captain, “What’s our mission here?” The captain replied sardonically, “We’re here to guard the ice-cream trucks going north so that someone else can guard them there.”

Much of the activity at an enduring FOB simply involves self-supply. These vast military oases raise the spectre of American permanence in Iraq, but, to me, they more acutely suggested American irrelevance. Soldiers have even coined a derogatory term for those who never get off the base: "fobbits." I spent two days at Speicher without seeing an Iraqi.

And another:

A field-grade officer in the 101st Airborne said, “The algorithm of success is to get a good-enough solution.” There were, he said, three categories of assessment for every aspect of the mission: optimal, acceptable, and unacceptable. He made it clear that optimal wasn’t in the running. “We’re handing a shit sandwich over to someone else,” the officer said.

Anyway, on to the news article:

Iraqis seem to be gritting their teeth and clinging grimly to the battered hope for democracy, even in what many see as a strange and uncomfortable incarnation.

Riyadh al-Adhadh, a Baghdad doctor, likened Iraq to a drowning man, and the prime minister-designate a floating plank to which people cling.

Said one Baghdad doctor: Iraq is a drowning man, and the prime minister-designate a floating plank.

"We have to hold on to the wood, even if it has nails," said the doctor, a rheumatologist named Riyadh al-Adhadh. "We need this wood, whatever its shape. It is all that prevents us from going under the sea."

Beyond the obvious obstacle of a severe lack of professionals and experts, many of whom have fled Iraq, Mr. Maliki will be under tremendous pressure from his own and other Shiite parties to fill his cabinet from within their ranks.

A woman in a housecoat stood in her doorway just down the street. "There's a lack of everything," she said. "We want someone who will come to save the people."