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Before we invaded Iraq, Colin Powell said, “You break it, you buy it.” How badly have we broken it?

The civilian death toll is now running at roughly 100 a day, with many of the victims gruesomely tortured with power tools or acid. Over the summer, more Iraqi civilians died violent deaths each month than the number of Americans lost to terrorism on Sept. 11. Meanwhile, the electricity remains off, oil production depressed, unemployment pervasive and basic services hard to find.

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Growing violence, not growing democracy, is the dominant feature of Iraqi life. Every Iraqi knows this. Americans need to know it too.

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Acknowledging the hard facts of today’s Iraq must be more than a political talking point for the president’s opponents. It is the only possible beginning to a serious national discussion about what kind of American policy has the best chance of retrieving whatever can still be retrieved in Iraq and minimizing the damage to wider American interests.

“A serious national discussion” might seem fruitless so long as Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are in charge. But someday they will be gone, and it will become possible to try to fix what they’ve broken, and partisan platitudes, from either side, will not be up to the task.

Shamefully, we have never taken this war very seriously. That must end.

We’ve been worried about Iran getting nuclear weapons. We know Pakistan already has nukes. We know that al Qaeda and Taliban fighters found refuge in remote areas of Pakistan after the U.S. attacked Afghanistan. So this is pretty scary:

Panicky rumors of a coup swept through Pakistan on Sunday after a power outage interrupted national television broadcasts and later plunged much of the country into darkness.

With the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, away on an extended trip to the United States and Canada at a time of regional tensions and growing insurgency in neighboring Afghanistan, many Pakistanis speculated that he had been overthrown in absentia.

The chairman of the national power administration, Tariq Hamid, said at a 10 p.m. news conference in Lahore that the outage was caused by technical problems and that no sabotage had been involved.