We may now be only weeks away from a complete collapse of the Iraqi army and the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq in the face of overwhelming public pressure on Tony Blair.

That is a realistic projection based on the reports of two Washington Post reporters, whose dispatches from inside Iraqi Army units and U.S. units assigned to train and work with the Iraqi military have just been published.

What the Post reporters found was massive disenchantment on both sides: American forces bitterly disappointed with the Iraqi government forces, and Iraqi troops harboring similar feelings toward their American counterparts. Only a small percentage of all Iraqi troops are now estimated to be adequately trained to take over the defense of their country. Desertions are widespread.

More than 1,700 American men and women sent to Iraq have returned home in body bags thus far, and more than 7,000 have been critically wounded. War dead in total exceeds 25,000, including "collateral casualties." And the price tag for our military operations tops $200 billion - and counting.

Recent surveys in Iraq have shown that insurgents are overwhelmingly Iraqis, not foreign fighters. Few are associated with al-Qaida.

Since President Bush’s declaration that "major combat operations are over," three weeks or so after the U.S.-British assault on Baghdad, there has been one disingenuous statement after another from the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon.

Successive rationales for the war - finding Saddam’s cache of weapons of mass destruction, heading off an imminent threat to Israel and even to our own country, capturing Saddam and ending his bloody dictatorial reign, establishing democracy in Iraq - have been trotted out, and found to be seriously flawed or even outright wrong.

Interviews by the Post reporters show that many U.S. and Iraqi troops no longer know what they are fighting for.

The scandals of prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad and at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, coupled with a burgeoning debt that likely will never be paid back by Iraqi oil and the Halliburton cost overruns ripping off the U.S. military by millions of dollars, have soured much popular support of the war.

With morale of our troops in the field trending lower by the week, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marines have missed their recruiting targets for the past four months straight. Unless something changes dramatically, a draft would seem unavoidable.

Conservative columnists and Republican members of Congress who voted for the war are now among those joining the chorus of criticism. The latest is Rep. Walter R. Jones, R-N.C., the very person who coined the term "freedom fries" for French fries served in the House cafeteria. He has matched Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and others in calling for a deadline for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

He also wants someone in the Bush administration "to be large enough to apologize for this war." So far, the silence from the White House has been deafening.