October has shaped up to be just the most recent bad month in Iraq for the United States. Indeed, with 76 US troops having been killed in the country as of Monday, October is on pace to be the deadliest month for US forces since 137 were killed in November 2004.

No wonder then that US President George W. Bush has decided to shake things up a bit. Not that he's changing strategy, of course. The US president is loathe to admit mistakes and no doubt fears that any "strategic" change could be interpreted as an admission that America's Iraq strategy to date has been flawed. Instead, in a Friday radio address he said: "Our goal in Iraq is clear and unchanging: Our goal is victory. What is changing are the tactics we use to achieve that goal."

Yet despite Bush's verisimilitude, the White House is clearly worried. Bush met for a half hour on Friday with General John Abizaid, head of the US Central Command and the top commander in the Middle East. And on Saturday, President Bush convened with a group of top White House and military officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley; General Abizaid; General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; General George Casey, commander of the US-led Multinational Forces in Iraq; and Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Iraq.

A senior US State Department official also decided to get in on the fun over the weekend, saying in an interview on the Arab television network Al Jazeera on Saturday that "undoubtedly there was arrogance and stupidity from the United States in Iraq." Alberto Fernandez, who speaks fluent Arabic, later apologized for his comments, saying that he "seriously misspoke." American officials said on Sunday that the comments do not reflect their views, and some have claimed that the comments were mistranslated by CNN and other news outlets.

For the Financial Times Deutschlandon Monday, "the situation in Iraq is as clear as it is sad." Any progress, such as a democratically elected government, is outweighed by Iraq's descent "into ever more chaos and violence." The German business daily is convinced that "there is civil war in Iraq," and it takes the Bush administration to task for "rendering itself blind to the real situation." The paper believes that "violence in Iraq cannot be solved by military means," and instead advocates dialogue with Iran and Syria. "How bad does the situation in Iraq have to become," it asks, "before Washington begins to fundamentally revise fundamental mistakes?"

The conservative daily Die Welt, as it has been doing virtually since US troops first set foot in Iraq, tries on Monday to convince a pacifist Germany that war is sometimes inevitable. "It's not war that is the worst of all things, rather the aggression that occasionally can only be stopped by war." Lesson two for Monday is that most people tend to think a war has been lost "when, after a certain amount of time, there is still no peace." And when, as the paper points out, the death tolls continue to rise. So what's the point here? Basically that we should not lose our patience with the situation in Iraq -- and that "a pull out would be calamitous. It would strengthen extremists in neighboring countries and would plunge the region into chaos." But the paper finds some signs of hope in a number of recent efforts within Iraq to combat terrorism. Stay the course, in other words. "Baghdad is not yet lost."

The business daily Handelsblatt takes a look at two potential course corrections available to the Bush administration -- before reaching the rather unsurprising conclusion that America's policy options are rather limited at the moment. Option one: the administration could withdraw troops from the region, which it has said would amount to capitulation and is therefore out of the question. Option two: "Concede that the situation cannot be brought under control without […] approaching those countries which one considers to be incarnations of evil: Iran and Syria." But this strategy is also not viable, because it carries an "enormous geopolitical price" -- recognition of the regional supremacy of Iran and Syria -- and because it would amount to "the failure of an entire concept, including the democratization of the Middle East." In other words, the paper points out, it's no wonder Bush just continues to repeat himself and -- as his father might say -- continues to "stay the course." He has no other choice. But that won't likely be successful either, the paper argues. Instead, "the US government has to start planning its own defeat."

-- Alex Bakst, 2:30 p.m. CET

Germany is eagerly anticipating the memoirs of ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder, which are expected to go on sale on Thursday. Indeed, Schröder -- the so-called "media chancellor" -- seems to be everywhere this week. DER SPIEGEL put his mug on this week's cover and runs excerpts of his book along with an interview. The tabloid Bild am Sonntag also ran an interview. And several newspapers dissected advance copies of the book on their editorial pages on Monday.

The mass-circulation Bild Zeitung wonders what caused the former chancellor in 2005 to call for a premature re-election "that the red-green coalition could not have won." The answer, according to Bild, is that it was Schröder's own Social Democratic Party (SPD) which drove him out "because he wanted to lead the SPD into the modern middle" of the political spectrum. "All too many people in the SPD never accepted Schröder's Agenda 2010 reform course," an attitude that has paralyzed the party, says the paper. "Presently, no one really knows where a SPD-chancellor would lead Germany."

The Financial Times Deutschland admits that the current grand coalition of conservatives and social democrats "is a disappointment," but also admonishes its readers not to resort to sentimental Schröder-nostalgia in reaction to the current political situation. The paper criticizes the ex-chancellor's "stubbornness, which also manifests itself in an inability to acknowledge mistakes even in hindsight." Instead, "Schröder uses his memoirs merely to justify his political machinations," which is why the paper believes the book will not evoke any sentimentalities among its readers.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is even less concerned that anyone will miss the ex-chancellor's "stop-and-go politics," a brand of policy-making the paper describes as "issue-related evasive maneuvers posing as high statesmanship." It was this brand of leadership, the paper writes, "that brought about the desperate situation that caused him to retreat into re-election in the first place." The conservative daily effectively excuses the current coalition government's recent political stalemates -- for example over health care reform -- with the claim that "the problem of the grand coalition is not weak leadership, it is an excess of unsolved problems, which certainly can not be solved à la Schröder."