A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.

—Arthur Bloch

I wanted to write something last Sunday for the third anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. But I found that I didn’t have any fresh insights to offer.

I checked a lot of articles and blogs, looking for something to link to, but everyone seemed to be repeating the same arguments they had been making for years. It seemed to me that nobody was casting new light on the situation.

After three years, we have apparently all stopped thinking about Iraq. We are now in a new mode, the automatic repetition of previously recorded thoughts. The Bush Administration has been in this mode for years.

This is bad — very bad. The administration promises to keep doing more of what hasn’t worked so far, with faith that it will start working any day now. The administration’s critics tell us how much better things would be if Bush had never started this war. Meanwhile, the situation in Iraq seems to be deteriorating day by day.

As much as I wish we had never launched this war, I know of no magic that will turn back the clock and give us a do-over. Like it or not, we are in Iraq. I don’t know how to fix Iraq, now that we’ve done so much to break it. What I do know is that all of us — Republican, Democrat, independent, liberal, conservative, moderate, young, old, skinny, stout — we have all got to get serious about figuring out how to fix it.

Unless we start doing some better thinking than we’ve done over the past three years, Iraq will be the kind of failed state that, in the past, has been a fertile breeding and training ground for despotism and terrorism.

Yes, we’re tired, but we can’t stop thinking now.