For the most part, the opinions one gets from reputed experts track closely with how they viewed the war before the war. If you were for it, then a democratic, prosperous state is just around the corner; if you were against it, the country could collapse into chaos at any moment. Well, it is an election year, and as in any complex situation, there are enough incidents and anecdotes to be cherry-picked by partisans. But that process of finding proof-incidents is not much help in assessing the current situation. Ideas for getting ourselves out of, or fixing, "this mess" will be influenced by ideology and biases, of course, but a reasonably accurate picture couldn't hurt.

It has hardly been a secret that I opposed the war because I thought Saddam Hussein's regime did not pose a threat imminent enough to justify a pre-emptive war and the United States should not be in the business of starting "preventive" wars to neutralize potential threats that might or might not ripen into something real. So you know my orientation going in, though I'll try to acknowledge countervailing facts.

The one thing almost everybody I talked to agreed on is that the rosiest scenarios spun by some in the administration and some cheerleaders in the policy community - that the U.S. would be greeted as liberators by Iraqis strewing rose petals and fully prepared, after a brief celebration, to assume full responsibility for a swift and peaceful transition to a deeply desired Western-style democracy - haven't panned out. Beyond that, and the fact that the initial military campaign went well, perhaps better even than some war enthusiasts had expected, the facts are often viewed through the lens of policy preference.

Was the interim constitution adopted last week after some last-minute wrangling a "breakthrough," as the Wall Street Journal editorial page put it, or a "real landmark," as Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute and a longtime proponent of using U.S. foreign policy to expand democracy around the world, told me? Or was it, as Marina Ottaway of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told me, a "development of limited impact - although failure to get an interim constitution would have been a significant defeat" for U.S. policy?

In some ways it was both, but as Mr. Muravchik would (and did) acknowledge, we won't know the real impact for years to come. And even then, perceptions are likely to be filtered through ideological lenses. Serious people still disagree about the meaning and impact of World War II.

I do think it is safe to say that while both proponents and opponents of the war made some bad calls, the anti-war side had the better of it.

Even if the inspection teams eventually find some chemical or biological weapons hidden beneath the sand somewhere, the failure to find any so far indicates that on the weapons score Saddam's regime was hardly an imminent threat to the United States or Iraq's neighbors. Likewise, while a few isolated Iraqi-al-Qaida contacts have been unearthed, the notion that they were active partners in a way that threatened us imminently has turned out to be the stuff of fantasy.

It is also true that President Bush seems to have been premature when he declared an end to "major military operations" on May 1. More Americans have been killed since than were killed during the active, invasive military phase.

Although intelligence is sketchy and nobody claims to know for sure how much resistance is coming from foreign terrorist elements, from Ba'ath Party remnants and from people who have become disaffected with U.S. occupation, Iraq has become a magnet for terrorists and radical Islamists who want to kill Americans or "infidels."

Lately, partially in response to U.S. forces improving their levels of self-protection and self-defense, the resistance fighters have been going more after Iraqis than Americans. This is a two-edged sword.

As the Rand Corp.'s James Dobbins told me a couple of weeks ago, "Our ultimate goal should be to protect Iraqi democrats, not just American soldiers," and our failure to do so does not bode well.

There are items on the positive side of the ledger.

Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute, told me, "the idea that you could topple Saddam Hussein and a few months later be negotiating to hand over the country to a group of Iraqis who, despite ample provocation, have avoided outright conflict among themselves, is really remarkable. In a few years I believe it will be seen as historic."

Ms. Pletka, who visited Iraq in October, pointed out that electricity and phone service are now better than they have ever been in Iraq, and oil exports are about at prewar levels. "There have been problems and things that could have been done better," she said. "There will be problems, setbacks and people killed in the future. But Iraq is a better place than it was a year ago and it is likely to continue to get better. You don't go from totalitarianism to democracy in a day or two."

Critics of our Iraqi policy would agree but differ about how well the administration has done so far and the prospects for continued improvement.

"The United States has experienced defeat after defeat during the transition, and has had to change policy five or six times," Marina Ottaway of the Carnegie Endowment told me. And although some would salute this as commendable flexibility, to others it looks as if the Bush administration never really had a transition plan of much substance and has been madly improvising since May 30.

Ms. Ottaway is concerned that the interim constitution, for example, "regulates a government nobody has agreed how to form." Most constitutions set out a method for forming the new government, but this one is silent on the subject. The U.N. special envoy is not slated to return to advise how to form an interim government until the middle of April.

That might not leave enough time to have a credible structure in place by June 30, when the U.S. is scheduled to hand over nominal sovereignty to the Iraqis and dissolve the Coalition Authority.

In fact, that won't matter much, except for the sake of political appearances, argues Ted Carpenter, vice president for defense and international studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. "The United States plans to have more than 100,000 troops remain in the country until at least 2006 and perhaps indefinitely," he told me. "They will have the real power, whatever is written in a piece of paper."

Carpenter sees three possible scenarios developing. The most likely, he thinks, is "a housebroken Saddam - a person nominally elected but holding the country together by authoritarian and sometimes brutal means while alternately serving and resisting U.S. interests." A partition of the country - either de jure by dividing it up along ethnic and religious lines or de facto by granting considerable local autonomy, is the second most likely. A more or less democratic and united Iraq, he thinks, is a distant third in the likelihood race.

Partition is viewed as a possibility because modern Iraq is an artifact of British colonialism, its borders drawn by Brits in 1920 from regions that were separate provinces in the old Ottoman Empire. Shiite Muslims, concentrated mostly in the south, make up about 60 percent of the population. Sunni Muslims, in the middle of the country, constitute perhaps 25 percent, while Kurds - Muslims but not Arabs - dominate the north. A couple of scholars, Liam Anderson and Gareth Stansfield, have written a book, "The Future of Iraq" (Palgrave-Macmillan), that advocates outright partition as the most peaceful plausible solution to the underlying demographic problems.

The Shiites have for the most part been peaceful because they see themselves ruling in the end. But recently, led by Grand Ayatollah al-Husseini al-Sistani, they have forced the United States to take their wishes into account.

Joshua Muravchik sees even this as potentially encouraging. "It's significant that Sistani hasn't kicked over the table, and that all his demands have been in the direction of more democracy sooner," he told me. "Nobody is saying democracy is an alien Western concept imposed by an imperialistic America. That bodes well for the long run, though there are bound to be problems along the way."

There's another way to view the Shiite situation. Stratfor.com, the private Web site and consulting service (which has long contended that the real purpose of the invasion, which it approved, was to acquire U.S. military bases in Iraq because having them in Saudi Arabia was becoming less tenable), sees a working alliance between Iran (dominated by a Shiite Islamist government) and Iraq's Shiites.

Iranian and Iraqi Shiites have been in fairly constant contact for years, in part because so many Shiite holy sites are in Iraq. Stratfor thinks "the Iranians who helped organize and define the Iraqi Shiite community had their own strategic interests. Iran wanted Iraq either neutralized or turned into a protectorate of Iran. Iraq was Iran's historical enemy, and the American problems in Iraq gave the Iranians the opportunity they needed to redefine the geopolitical status of Iraq - a fundamental national interest for Iran."

Thus Iran is tacitly backing the American occupation of Iraq - for now - but a Sunni-Shiite conflict could break into violent hostilities fairly soon. That could leave the United States a "hostage to Iranian geopolitical dreams" unless the United States helps Saudi Arabia crush its indigenous jihadists and establishes a Sunni-Shiite balance of power in the region.

Both Danielle Pletka and Joshua Muravchik cautioned me that even a successful transition in a democratic direction would take years or decades and would be accompanied by plenty of setbacks and problems. But moves toward democracy (a long shot in a culture that has not until now really valued it) could also be upset by developments that have little to do with the real desires of the Iraqi people.