Wars do not always follow arcs or clean story lines. The history of warfare is replete with sudden reversals based on the loss of key people and the changing fortunes of peoples. England in the Hundred Years War won a series of shattering victories, occupied most of France, had the dynastic advantage of marriage - and lost all of it during the occupation of France, despite the leadership of a knight who the French were in awe of, naming him "The English Achilles".

The parallel for the American experience in Iraq is not Vietnam, but the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The essential tension is of a large battlefield military designed to rapidly enter and occupy key cities, and threaten a civilian population with death and destruction of their high capital and high culture. The Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia and Hungary, because these peoples had something to defend - their identity was from what they had built. The cultures that form the most brutal resistance are those that are willing to sacrifice monuments and buildings - however dear - in return for the land itself. It helps if the land has something valuable that bombs cannot destroy. Oil for example.

The United States has had far less trouble in Afghanistan for the simple reason that all the US has wanted there is a Republic of Kabul, with the ability to engage in strikes on particular armed groups. Since there has been almost no attempt to alter the political, economic or social arrangements of the country, and the US is not faced anywhere close to the casualty rate in Afghanistan as Iraq. From this flows a second reality, since changing Afghanistan is not a matter of confidence for the regime in Washington, thwarting it is not a point of pride for those that seek to embarass that regime.

Iraq however, has been made an issue of confidence, and therefore the dynamic of a home grown series of insurgents backed by outside interests that seek to embarass or hinder the United States and/or its present administration.

The important realization is that the United States war aims invited this dynamic, by intending to confiscate the commodity of value, and by intending to impose a political order which threatens the cultural values which provide a unifying basis for the communities and peoples of Iraq, was in trouble from the beginning. Added into this was an attempt to run the invasion "on the cheap" so that the US budget could be financed by massive deficits and borrowing intended to produce large tax breaks for the wealthy.

The concepts which are in play here are first, occupation tactical doctrine, second, insurgent tactical doctrine, and third the "triangle of military failure" - a cycle where an occupation has failed to achieve the objective of stabilization, and uses massive response as a means of cowing the civilian population. This leads to more, not less resistence, because each attack destroys more of what the civilian population would be willing to trade compliance with the new regime for. Essentially, each time the occupation over-reacts, it destroys, rather than heightens, the reason that people would otherwise coöperate. This is why massacres, purges and other face to face wholesale slaughter are more effective in producing compliance than destroying with bombs impersonally. Those who remain fear a repetition of the massacre, but they have a paradoxical gain - what the dead owned before, they own now.

Occupation tactical doctrine against an insurgency is "Isolate, Concentrate, Anhilate" The occupation military has the advantages of mobility and firepower, against an insurgency that has the advantages of stealth and commity with their fellow nationals. The first step of the occupation military must be, at all hazards, to sepearate the wolves from the sheep. Failure to do this makes all subsequent steps useless, simply because the application of fire power will alienate the civilian population, and destroy the nascent political order. One cannot build a nation while bombing it back into the pebble age.

The United States has repeatedly failed to engage in this first step, and thus, it has not occupied Iraq for four years, but occupied it for one year, four times. Iraq looks little different than it did on the day after the invasion declared itself in control of the country, simply because it is still in the same mode it was on that day. This has been maintained by the US desire to remain impersonal in its primary war fighting mode - that is, it wishes to insulate its fighting forces from the insurgency, and therefore prefers to use "chomp and stomp" tactics to produce the effective wave, and seeks to use the Iraqi armed forces as its interface with the populace.

The result is that the occupation of Iraq has followed the same path as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The first step was the invasion, which proceded quickly. In both cases the regime being overthrown was in charge largely because it was not in control of most of the country, and did not attempt to impose control over most of the country.

The second step was a blizzard of activity to establish the ideologically preferred result. In the case of the Soviet Union a state which while nominally personally liberated was directed at the support of a party apparatus. In the case of the United States, a neo-conservative regime which while technically "Iraq for Iraqis" was intended to create a colonial relationship for foreign exploitation of oil. People in both countries felt that they were free, to be slaves.

The third step was an endless loop of acting as if this society was so self-evidently better, that those who opposed it were on the violent fringes of society. That is, that the people who rejected the new order were people who would only have been compelled by overwhelming violence in any event. This is a crucial failure of ideology and strategy. Occupiers must demonstrate superiority and must effect Isolation, they cannot presume it to be the case.

The cardinal failure of leadership during this phase was the repeated failure to realize that the ideology of society which was being imposed would not work in the form it was being presented. That is, both the Soviet Union and the Neocon regime had warped and ultimately disinformed views of human society. In both cases what was defined as "freedom" was not, and in both cases the assumed superiority of their way of being was so soaked through the leadership and leadership cadres, as to make counter-examples and counter-evidence invisible to them.

This third phase is seen by the repeated failure to create a native body of government and military apparatus that could enforce the new social order which had been ordained by attempted fiat, and the absolute failure to create a wave of compliance which saw the new order as the best road to improvement.

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The next phase of guerilla operations is to bleed the extremities of the occupying power, to make it not worth enforcing fiat throughout the realm, and to force the occupying power to place greater and greater emphasis on fortified positions. This creates an important dynamic - one seen in the Chinese Civil War, the Nationalists built walls, not because walls kept out the Japanese, but because they made it easier to monitor the comings and goings of the population and hence the communists. The communists, when they took or won control of a town knocked the walls down. Suddenly closed=government and open=insurgency.

The building of the Green Zone and attempts at similiar "enduring presence" bases by the US created a similar dynamic - locals knew who was in charge by the kind of access control implemented. Sudden territoriality had been established, and who was actually in control became visible. One of the basic units of compliance is knowing who one must comply with. The British were forced to storm a police station because it had come under the control of insurgents.

The penultimate phase of an occupation failing is the constant battle for the capital. Whether in Lebanon during the 1980's, or in Baghdad today, a regime which cannot impose its will on the nominal capital no longer has the ability to project order outwards.

This phase ties together the pattern of logistics which both the Soviets and the US went through - first they lost the roads, then they were forced to move more and more by helicopter. Then, when shatter attacks - attacks designed to break the sense of security in government strong holds - were lauched, these choppers needed to be closer and closer to combat. The insurgency isn't just shooting at choppers more often - they have more choppers to shoot at. Instead of a situation where the attacking armored forces can clear out an area and then medivac out casualties and use gunships to quash any attacks from the nearby area, the choppers must now get close enough to be shot at with man portable weapons.

The United States is clearly at this phase of occupation, and on the other side is humiliation. This means that there is grave danger that people who were saved before, will die now. That is the ratio of fatalities to casualties will start moving back towards the Vietnam average, which was considerably higher than in the current conflict. It also means that the political order that was imposed is going to continue to deteriorate, as every faction with a vendetta can disrupt commerce and daily life with truck bombs and assorted other attacks on civilians. Since the attackers are anonymous, the blame increasingly rolls towards the occupation and its government.

These errors alone would be enough to make Iraq doomed, however, there is an additional effect that is present, and that is the consistent pattern of the regime in Washington in playing everything for domestic political control of their base. That is, at a time when the occupation of Iraq is collapsing, there is a clear attempt to divert attention to Iran by blaming some US deaths on Iranian munitions. Undoubtedly some Iranian munitions are reaching Shia militia groups, however it is the Sunni insurgency, funded not by Iran but by individuals in gulf states and elsewhere, which is responsible for most US deaths. As with Nixon in Cambodia, Bush is seeking to widen a war that he is already losing.

This is a mistake the Soviets made as well. In the death throes of the Soviet Union, crackdowns against dissidents in Poland, within the Soviet Union and threats to do so against the nascent "Velvet Revolution" in Czechoslovakia were added to the already overtaxed and overworked credibility of Soviet ground forces. It might have been possible to invade Poland to stop the strikes, if the Soviet Union were not already mired in a quagmire of their own. Widening a failed colonial war is almost a sure recipe for creating consequences worse than those already in store in the post occupation era.