"We're no longer staring into the abyss of defeat." That was the pronouncement of Senator and presidential candidate John McCain during yesterday's Senate hearings on Iraq.

Actually, it feels to me like we're staring into a lot of abysses. And maybe McCain defines "defeat" differently than I do. As we slog on in this civil war, Iraqi citizens will continue to lose lives. Members of the US armed services will continue to lose lives. The United States' reputation will continue to suffer.

And stability in that part of the world is terrifyingly tenuous.

All thanks to the meddling and the incompetence of the Bush administration.

Yesterday's Petraeus-Crocker session in the Senate didn't provide any new information. But it gathered the bad news together and laid it out for us all to see. We'd better take a good, hard look.

1) The United States will have to find a way to deal with Iran, but that nation's crafty involvement in Iraq, and the muscle-flexing of its leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, over uranium enrichment, among other things, will make that dealing tough. The next president will have to walk a fine line between appearing weak and being bellicose.

2) We're spending a fortune in Iraq, money that is needed elsewhere, at home and abroad - this while Iraq's oil revenues are said to have increased dramatically and its reconstruction efforts have lagged. When California Senator Barbara Boxer quizzed General Petraeus yesterday on why Iraq isn't shouldering more of the costs, he had this answer: "If there's anything that the ambassador and I will take back to Iraq, it is to ask those kinds of questions more directly." Oh, good.

3) An abyss is looming on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the real Al Qaeda is growing stronger.

4) Our military is stretched so thin that we're sending exhausted troops back for third and fourth tours. A large percentage of returning soldiers are suffering from mental illness. And there is increasing concern that if we need troops to fight against other threats, we won't have enough.

5) There's growing disagreement about just what the military surge has accomplished. Some observers in Iraq insist that the drop in violence is due not to the surge but to the ceasefire imposed by Moktada al-Sadr - a ceasefire that is now very much in jeopardy.

Indiana Senator Richard Lugar had this assessment during yesterday's hearing: "Iraq will be an unstable country for the foreseeable future, and if some type of political settlement can be reached, it will be inherently fragile."

All this may not feel like an abyss to John McCain. But it is. And little is likely to change while we wait for the next assessment by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker.

MSNBC is carrying live coverage of today's hearing in the House of Representatives.