KEY POINTS:
I have been roaming in the United States, reading the temper as best you can from a hired car and the menial staff of what the US likes to call a hospitality industry. Its deficiencies have been blamed for a decline in visitors this year. I believe it.
It was my first visit since the trauma of 2001 and the place has changed. Americans, once friendly to a fault, seem wary of the world now.
It is not so much the grim security precautions at consulates and airports, which are perfectly understandable, but the disengagement you face at reception desks, restaurants, shop counters - everywhere except the bars, where you sit at the counter and conversation still comes with the service.
When they talk of topics other than football, it's Iraq. Always Iraq. And it is a subject of head-numbing mortification rather than words. You don't hear anybody outside radio talkland who believes anything can be salvaged from the mission to democratise the Middle East.
And the call-in radio can be off the planet. Somewhere in the south the car picked up a station that was explaining how world trade talks fitted Biblical warnings.
But even intelligent discussion in congress and newspapers was in a desperate state of denial that the calamity they have brought is a civil war.
The keenly awaited report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group landed while I was there. A talk host called it the Iraq Surrender Group. It advocated an increase in US forces for the purpose of training the local Army and police to take over early in 2008 and to leave them to it at that point, ready or not.
I bought a copy of the report. Its description of the state of the Iraqi Army and police rather belied its hopes of a handover.
Of the Army, it said: "Significant questions remain about the ethnic composition and loyalties of some Iraqi units - specifically whether they will carry out missions on behalf of national goals instead of a sectarian agenda."
The soldiers lacked leadership, equipment, personnel, logistics and support. As one commentator added, other than that they're fine.
They lacked personnel because the soldiers have to go home to take money to their families since there is no banking system. And they face no penalties if they stay away for a bit. Units often have less than half their number ready to turn out.
After describing this, the report turns to the police. "The state of the Iraqi police is substantially worse than that of the Iraqi Army ..."
"It has neither the training nor legal authority to conduct criminal investigations, nor the firepower to take on organised crime, insurgents or militias.
"Iraqi police cannot control crime and they routinely engage in sectarian violence, including the unnecessary detention, torture and targeted execution of Sunni Arab civilians ...
"There are ample reports of Iraqi police officers participating in training in order to obtain a weapon, uniform and ammunition for use in sectarian violence. Some are on the payroll but don't show up for work ..."
The American press hadn't known it was this bad. The report did not do much for the country's despondency.
The President's office said he would respond with an important announcement before the New Year. Then it said he wouldn't. Reportedly he was listening to some diehard advisers who, with Donald Rumsfeld out of the way, were pushing for a build up of the occupation force, a "surge". One more push might do it.
Bush has resumed talking of "victory", a word that would be odd even if his mission was succeeding. If the purpose of toppling Saddam Hussein was to encourage Iraqis to set up an exemplary pro-American democracy in the heart of Arab territory, "victory" would not be a diplomatic term for their compliance.
T-shirts on sale in Union Square, Manhattan, proclaim: "I hated Bush before it was cool", but truthfully the country seems past caring about him. It gave him its verdict in the congressional elections and now it just wants someone to find a way out.
Every day's delay brings more American deaths. It is rare to see the stars and stripes flying above half-mast any day in any town. Yellow ribbons line church fronts.
All comment on the war's futility needs to offer a nod to "our brave soldiers". No occasion of any kind is complete without a tribute to those "serving our country in Iraq". You seldom hear what the servicemen think.
In a week that two Alabama soldiers died in Iraq a local paper carried a speech one of them had made to a church audience when he'd been back home just six weeks earlier. Christopher Mason, a rodeo clown before he enlisted, had told the Life Church of Mobile:
"Folks, you got to dig down deep. When things get tough for you, you got to remember you're in a war. You're in a battle for your soul, people. You hear me? And it's no joke. The bullets we play with are real over there and the things the devil uses on us is real over here."
At the site of the World Trade Centre, the air is clear, subways are running again through the chasm where the basement floors used to be. Cranes and earth-moving machines are back in there, preparing the foundations for the twisted "Freedom Tower" that will rise above the downtown skyline.
The first joist, carrying inscriptions by those who had lost family in the Twin Towers, was ceremonially dropped into place the other day, and had to be unceremoniously replaced a day or two later because it was the wrong way around. Life seems normal but for Iraq.
How are they going to get out? I had no suggestions for them. They shouldn't get out; having tossed Iraqis from the frying pan of Saddam's police state to the fire of their tribal and doctrinal antagonisms, they must stew in the juice.
I heard nobody there say Happy New Year.
