The news in Iraq has gone from bad to worse, and on Monday the White House announced that President George W. Bush had quit using the phrase "stay the course" in public about the war.

"He stopped using it," said Tony Snow, the White House press secretary. "It left the wrong impression about what was going on and it allowed critics to say, 'Well, here's an administration that's just embarked upon a policy and not looking at what the situation is.'"

Snow insisted that "the opposite" was the case -- the White House, he implied, was a flexible decision-making outfit capable of seeing, and evaluating, all its options. US Republicans have run for Congress this election season on a broad platform of strength and constancy in Iraq. But with this October shaping up to be one of the bloodiest since the US entered Iraq, US public support for the war, such as it is, is once again waning.

And the worst may be ahead for Bush. A report by the Iraq Study Group, headed by onetime Secretary of State James Baker is due out soon, though not before November congressional elections. Baker, a Bush family friend known for his barbed tongue, has reportedly called Iraq "a helluva mess," and his Study Group will compile a list of difficult new ways to fix it. Nobody is expecting the report to be terribly glowing.

German papers on Tuesday are mulling America's options. "After more than three years of war," the center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes, setting the melancholy tone, "Washington seems to have lost Iraq. US troops can't vanquish Sunni rebels or control the semi-official and murderous Shiite militias." The Iraqi people, like the Afghan people, seem to be "disillusioned by Western 'nation building.'" The editors believe dividing Iraq into a handful of sovereign states would be tricky and unstable, and a troop pullout would require a plan for militias to give up their weapons, which in turn would need a strong government. "This, in Baghdad," the editors argue, "is not in sight."

The left-leaning daily Die Tageszeitung writes bitterly that, "No one in America talks of progress in Iraq anymore. This in itself is progress." The commentator points out that US and British authorities want to solve the post-Saddam mess by setting an "ultimatum" for the government to grow strong and disarm its militias. This, the writer argues, is like welfare reform in Germany -- "The logic seems to be that if you want something (from the powers that be), you can have it -- but only if you're put under enough pressure." The taz commentator offers exactly one way out of the mess, but admits that it might "contradict beloved political dogmas" -- "invite Iran and Syria to take active part in solving the problem." Talks with Washington's arch-enemies may not guarantee success, the writer argues, "but not to attempt it will guarantee failure."