The headline says it all. The US military is bidding to get more positive press for the war in Iraq. They are working to do their part with a "run and hide" strategy - no offensive moves, which means that fatalities are down to "wastage", as the term went on the Western front in World War II - deaths that happen just because there is a war on.

Meanwhile I have to read Xinhua to hear that Romania has left the coalition of the billing - saying that it will pull out in less than two months.

Here at home, Bush is back to accusing everyone who speaks the truth about Iraq of being defeatists. No, Bush is the one who has been defeated in the war. It's almost like the "cheerleaders for failure" line - it's the warbloggers who have been cheerleaders for fiasco in Iraq.

But let's get back to reality - the US military has been defeated in Iraq, and is being order to hide from the enemy. This isn't the worst reality in the world - someone in the White House clearly understands that throwing more lives away before an election is a bad idea - but it certainly isn't the best reality in the world either.

The same kind of divorced from reality campaigning was on display in the gulf. As Bush presided over a catastrophic failure with the Katrina disaster, he now tours the gulf telling people how wonderfully well he did.

In both cases the Republicans are depending on the one piece of reality that they do grasp - that the press will faithfully copy these charges down, and repeat them endlessly. "Are Bush's enemies defeatist?" they will ask over and over again. Hoping that somehow the fact that they are asking the question will make it seem more plausible. The Republicans also understand that they need to get their base out - the Republicans want voters who are not merely in favor of War, but War without reason, war with victory and war without end.

One of the objectives of Iraq is to hamstring future administrations and future Congresses - create a huge white elephant which must be funded, lest the military base bunnies rise up in revolt and send more aggressive spenders to Washington, and the press savages anyone who would touch the 100 billion dollars a year poured down a dry hole as being "defeatist". The idea being when a Democrat pulls out, it was he or she who "lost the war."

The answer to all of this is in the numbers - Bush approval is in the sub-40 realm, the voters think America is on the wrong track by more than 2 to 1 and they disapprove of how Bush is handling Iraq by similar margins. The American public has, since Vietnam, had a two part mantra on war "Win and go home." Americans don't like to occupy countries, they like to invade countries.

Which is why Iraq is a problem. "Win" is not on the table, and some form of "run" is. Either Americans can choose "run and hide", and spend billions of dollars building bunkers in Baghdad, while New Orleans drowns, or they can leave Iraq to its fate, and hope that the oil starts flowing again. The pressure, on this executive or the next one, will be to install a strong man who will pump oil so long as we don't ask how much blood is mixed in with it. With oil at stratospheric costs, and with few good alternatives, there will be no other acceptable options. Iraq without a dictator slides into chaos relatively quickly. The Kurds will be able to pull out of a sinking ship, but the Shia and Sunni are locked in a deathly embrace, intermingled across the country.

Almost two years ago I did a statistical survey of casualty rates, entitled the dark at the end of the tunnel. The first conclusion that I drew was that while the insurgents were throwing low quality attrition fighters at the US, the US was losing high skilled individuals:

In Vietnam it was not, ultimately, the attrition of enlisted personnel that was fatal to the US war effort, it was the attrition of low level officers. While the casualty rates for "grunts" in Vietnam were high, they were more sustainable than the Korean conflict, or the American Civil War. What was unsustainable was the attrition to the officer core - which was at rate comparable to the worst conflicts in American history. There was a leadership drain. This is a continuing pattern: in Afghanistan, it was the loss of high level officers and helicopter pilots that doomed the Soviet occupation.

Which brings up the third prong of the model of conflict: replacement rates. Individuals with special skill and talent sets are not only harder to replace in time, but there is a far more limited pool of people. There are limited numbers of people who have the combination of talent and trainability to be pilots, colonels and doctors. Loss of one of these is equivalent to losing 100 ordinary soldiers for attrition purposes. This isn't the same thing as saying that the lives of each and every person aren't valuable as human lives, but in the calculus of sustaining a war, some losses weigh much more heavily than others.

When an military begins losing high value personnel at an unsustainable rate, one of the first responses is to keep the ones they have in the field longer and longer. This, while it works in the short run, is fatal in the long run. The only people who can train new skilled individuals are experienced skilled individuals. The best people to train new combat chopper pilots, are combat chopper pilots. This was a lesson learned in World War II. The Japanese kept many of their best pilots deployed for battle after battle, the Americans rotated many of their experienced pilots back. Over time, the American air forces increased in average skill, while slow attrition removed the most knowledgeable and able core of Japanese pilots. Without the warrior skills to pass on, the Japanese were finally forced to throw barely trained, and finally kamikazee pilots at the Americans.

From this I drew an additional conclusion - not only would the US be keeping forces in Iraq longer, there would come a point when the US war strategy would become "garrison mode":

The other class of individuals that must be looked at is the loss of high leadership. So far this rate has been sustainable, but it is creating the same brittle point: as US forces rely more and more on remaining in "garrison" mode, it reduces the ability to project force out into the country side. We are protecting our officer core, but at the cost of effectiveness in fighting the insurgency.

This would mean:

The United States is within 18 months of a crisis point in the occupation, where the Iraqi rebellion will be sufficiently advaned to execute shatter attacks at the vulnerability points, and the United States will no longer be able to replace the crack troops that are being lost in ordinary opperations in Iraq. At this point the ability of the US to engage in "chomp and stomp" operations to slow the spread of the rebellion will dwindle, and the insurgency will be able to openly take control of more and more of Iraq itself. Morale is dropping and dissent within the pro-war military community is growing.

Here we are, 18 months later, and the US is no longer in the position of being able to execute offensive operations, and the violence has metastasized to the entire Iraqi state. "Civil War" - a description denied vehemently a few months ago, is now the reported condition of Iraq to the Congress by the military leadership.

At that point I warned:

These factors indicate that the United States, should it desire a postive outcome in Iraq, will have to make large sacrifices to create a much larger war effort, will have to force internal political changes in the Iraqi government leadership, will have to take Iraqi security personnel out of Iraq to be trained in safe areas to be redeployed in Iraq.

Current US replacement rates, and military strategy do not allow for these changes, and therefore it can be concluded that should the present rate of losses of coalition personnel and Iraqi security forces continue, without a dramatic increase in casualties inflicted on the enemy, that the US occuaption in Iraq will have a negative outcome - producing either a failed state, or a state with a hostile government.

In the last month the danger line - namely Shia insurgency in Iraq - after being quiet for two years since the Summer of 2004, has also moved back to the front of the line. The recent performance of Hezbollah in Lebanon indicates what is possible for an insurgency which has a supply of heavy, man portable, anti-tank weapons. While the M-1 tank has superior armor and less vulnerable because of the topography of Iraq, there are more caught in cities, where urban tactics would make it possible for insurgents to begin tank hunting garrison duty forces. This could begin happening as early as late spring of 2007.

In short the predictions of that time have been born out, the insurgency was not "in its death throes", but, to the contrary, was destroy high value high skilled personnel at the cost of low value light infantry and guerillas. The political situation has not improved, on the contrary, the warning that the insurgency would spread beyond the Sunni core leading to a deteriorating hold of the government on power has begun to happen. As predicted the United States is no longer able to execute offensive opperations, and has held forces in Iraq for longer and longer time periods.

Thus the political strategy of pressing Iraq as the centerpiece of success and the war on terrorism can only be maintained with a compliant press. There have been enough books by reporters and statements by generals to indicate that front line individuals in both the press and the government know what the score is on the ground. That the high level officials in the government are defending policy to the last man, since it isn't their blood that is being shed by and large - is understandable, it is their fiasco, and they are stuck with it. The willingness of the owners of the press to over-rule the facts being supplied to them by their own reporters is far less understandable - it would seem counter-productive and unprofitable to tell a country that wants out of war lies about how well the war is going. Instead, it would seem that the most profitable path is to tell people the truth that they want to hear.

Namely, we have reached the on coming dark at the end of the tunnel, and should we continue on our current course, the destabilization of Iraq is a matter of months, not years.