This news analysis by Michael Gordon appears in today's NYT magazine; with its point of view and directness, it reads like an Atlantic Monthly article.

The rules posted on the wall of the Marine base in Barwana concisely summed up the American predicament in Iraq: Be polite, be professional, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.

What I saw in more than three weeks in Anbar Province was not reassuring.

Anbar has long been what the military calls an "economy of force" operation, which is a polite way of saying that troop requirements elsewhere in Iraq have led American commanders to employ fewer forces in the province than the situation warrants. As a consequence, counterinsurgency operations have taken on the quality of a whack-a-mole arcade game.

This lethal game would be more manageable if the insurgency were weakening. Instead, it is stronger than ever.

Officially, the Bush administration’s strategy is: Clear, hold and build. But with limited American forces to do any clearing, the war in western Iraq looks much more like hang on and hand over. Hang on against an insurgency that seems to be laying roadside bombs as quickly as they are discovered, and hand over to an Iraqi military that is still a work in progress.