To quote

.... The invasion has solidified a system divided into sects and operating on the basis of patronage and intimidation. The composition of parliament is nearly two thirds Islamist. There are no institutions. Ministries are sectarian booty and factional bastions. .... What is still, in spite of Mr Bush’s attempts to dress it up, an essentially military strategy is just not credible. The US army ... does not have the troops to master [an insurgency] on this scale – especially if its own masters are planning to open a new front.

It has failed to control the insurgency in the Sunni triangle – a rebellion by a minority of the minority. Now it aims to confront Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shia radical, and his 60,000-strong Mahdi army, in a fight that could set fire to east Baghdad and south Iraq, where British troops could easily be enveloped in the flames.

The contradiction at the heart of the US approach, however, is this: after casually overturning the Sunni order in Iraq and empowering the Shia in an Arab heartland country for the first time in nearly a millennium, Washington took fright at the way this had enlarged the power of the Shia Islamist regime in Iran. Now, while dependent on Tehran-aligned forces in Baghdad, and unable to dismantle the Sunni Jihadistan it has created in western Iraq, the US is trying to put together an Arab Sunni alliance against Iran. This is a fiasco with the fuel to combust into a region-wide conflagration.

The only feasible way forward is the approach of the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton commission – which the new US Congress should embrace and insist on.

This would make support for the Iraqi government and army conditional on their real effort to promote national reconciliation, which would in turn, as it progressed, be rewarded with billions of dollars in long-term aid from the US and Iraq’s neighbours. This external support – from Turkey to Saudi Arabia and Iran to Syria – would be built up within a wide-ranging diplomatic offensive in the region that would include Tehran and Damascus. Mr Bush is instead threatening to expand the war.

“Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops” he said on Wednesday. “We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria.” The Iraq surge is beginning to look like the Vietnam escalation, spilling over into Iran and Syria the way that one did into Cambodia and Laos.

Mr Bush is right to argue that defeat in Iraq would be very serious. He is wrong in failing to recognise defeat is what he is staring at – and that this approach will help guarantee it.

Well, I happen to think like the Soviets by the mid to late 80s, the US has already lost the game. It is merely a matter of whether the US will dig the hole deeper or not.

Frightenly, it appears that the current American administration and its cretinously incompetent leader, Bush, want desperately to drive the US over the cliff in some magical belief this will resolve something.