Before long, the first story about "fragging" in Iraq may appear in the newspapers.

The term comes from the Vietnam War. It's what happens when the morale of ordinary soldiers, or grunts, suddenly plummets as they realize that they are putting their lives at risk for the sake of an unpopular war that's already lost.

In Vietnam, fragging became common as conscripted American soldiers inflicted injuries on their own officers in order to prevent them from taking soldiers out on missions where heavy casualties were a certainty.

In Iraq, where the great majority of the American soldiers are professionals and volunteers, fragging will be rare.

But demoralization and a sense of pointlessness are bound to progressively erode the soldiers' discipline and their willingness to risk their lives for a lost cause.

The issue of an American withdrawal from Iraq has already made the critical transition from the "whether?" stage to the "when?" stage.

That decisive policy shift has been made inevitable by the Democrats' decisive victory in the mid-term elections.

The possibility exists now, though, that the stage beyond may come far more quickly than anyone has supposed. This would be the "why not now?" stage. After it, just one more stage would remain. It's the "cut and run" stage.

Already, the "why not now?" stage is starting to take shape. Comments made by Democrats right after their sweeping, double victory in the Senate and House of Representatives were quite cautious. They talked mostly about purely domestic issues, such as the need for an increase in the minimum wage.

Over the weekend, a significant attitudinal change occurred. Democrats are now sounding as if they accept that American politics has become single-issue politics — that issue, of course, being Iraq.

In television interviews on Sunday, three senior Democrats — the incoming Senate majority leader and the incoming chairs of the Senate committees on the armed services and on foreign relations — all declared that getting agreement on progressive withdrawals to start early next year is now their top priority.

This shift by the Democratic Congressional leadership is bound to affect the Democrats' presidential nomination race that will start next year for the 2008 election.

The beneficiaries will be anti-war candidates such as Senator Barack Obama whose book, The Audacity of Hope, has been a surprise best-seller. Those who still support the war — such as Hillary Clinton, even though she is still the front-runner — are likely to find themselves struggling.

At the same time as the Democrats have become tougher about Iraq, the White House has become softer.

On election night last week, while President George W. Bush announced the resignation of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he also declared that his goal in Iraq remained that of "victory."

By contrast, at the weekend Bush Chief of Staff Joshua Bolton said, "We're willing to talk about anything" even while describing any fixed withdrawal timetable as "a true disaster for the Iraqi people."

It is, in fact, entirely possible that Bolton is quite right about the consequences of any withdrawal timetable.

The insurgents would read it as an admission of defeat. American power and influence in Iraq would quickly dwindle away.

The consequence could well be all-out civil war and unrestrained sectarian violence leading to a breakup of the country.

It's at least equally possible, though, that no alternative exists any longer.

Ordinary Americans clearly have arrived at the point where they will no longer support a war that costs them blood and money and that itself has become pointless now that the last justification for it — the hope of installing a democracy in Iraq — has vanished.

The start of fragging by disillusioned American soldiers would mark the arrival of the moment at which the U.S. military itself ceases to support the war.

This could happen because the proud and formidably efficient American military would risk being destroyed by a war that goes on and on without purpose, exactly as happened in Vietnam.

The cut-and-run stage hasn't yet arrived. But it's close.

As is the ultimate paradox, about the only people who can now prevent it are the Iraqis themselves; the Americans have become their hostages.