The Iraq war has left the U.S. military "in a position of strategic peril," retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey has warned in the wake of a recent trip to Iraq.

"The majority of the Iraqi population [Sunni and Shia] support armed attacks on American forces" while "U.S. domestic support for the war in Iraq has evaporated and will not return," McCaffrey writes in a memo to colleagues at the U.S. Military Academy, where he is an adjunct professor of international affairs.

He says the United States and its allies must focus on a strategy aimed at a political consensus among the three main Iraqi population groups: Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs and Kurds.

"We can still achieve our objective" of a stable Iraq, he writes in a memo to colleagues at the U.S. Military Academy, where he is an adjunct professor of international affairs, but "[w]e have very little time left."

Failure in Iraq will have dire consequences, according to McCaffrey. "A disaster in Iraq will in all likelihood result in a widened regional struggle which will endanger America's strategic interests in the Mideast for a generation," he writes. "We will also produce another generation of soldiers who lack confidence in their American politicians, the media, and their own senior military leadership."

McCaffrey paints a largely gloomy picture of the situation in Iraq, which he says "is ripped by a low grade civil war which has worsened to catastrophic levels with as many as 3,000 citizens murdered per month."

"The population is in despair," he writes. "Life in many of the urban areas is now desperate."

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Ultimately, only a political deal will end the bloodshed and secure a satisfactory outcome for the United States in Iraq, according to McCaffrey.

"The primary war winning strategy for the United States in the coming 12 months must be for Ambassador Ryan [Crocker] and General Petraeus to focus their considerable personal leadership skills on getting the top 100 Shia and Sunni leaders to walk back from the edge of all-out civil war, he writes. "Reconciliation is the way out. There will be no imposed military solution with the current non-sustainable U.S. force levels. Military power cannot alone defeat an insurgency \ufffd the political and economic struggle for power is the actual field of battle."