Crucial to the Bushite agenda was a simple plan: massive tax reductions on the very wealthy coupled with amassive increases in defense spending. Defense spending pushes up oil prices, and massive tax reductions allow US elites to bid up the prices of paper assets so that the money spent on oil is recycled here. The trick however, relied on a smaller actual military to fight and win in Iraq, so as to put a flow of oil on line before the drain became unsustainable.

The failure of this policy is now rippling backwards: mesoëconomic imbalances are piling up, with more and more of America's debt held by countries who are not liberal, open, capitalist or democratic.

We are not only losing Iraq, but Afghanistan as well. The military is over extended, and as a result becoming burned out. This will lead to increased psychological and physical casualties, both short and long term.

Since the Department of Defense seems to have forgotten basic military doctrine, things such as "win a war before launching a new one." Let us review the pattern of victory for an insurgency.

A guerilla army must first neutralize the major military force's advantages of logistics, mobility and firepower, immobilize the major military force, it then procedes to bleed the major military force and finally shatter the brittle points in the major military force's ability to hold territory and critical points. First don't get killed, then fix in place, then put vulnerable points in exposed positions, and then deliver attacks with disproportionate effect. The occupation will end when the potential profits from the occupation are higher than the costs. Even if the major military force is "winning" on the ground, the key is to deny them the profits of occupation against the costs.

Fade-fix-bleed-shatter is the cycle of guerilla strategy. The major military has the inverse doctrine: ICA (Isolate, Concentrate, Annihilate).

The in the case of the guerilla force, one of the most important processes then, is to grind down the the combat readiness of individual soldiers in the military. Since defeating a guerilla force requires vigilance and attention, fatigue is a powerful weapon. As importantly, the guerilla war cycle constantly tests the judgment of the people involved. Judgment is the mental capacity which is most clearly degraded by fatigue: the ability to rapidly make choices based on the weighing of large numbers of initially uncorrelated perceptions and pieces of information. As judgment of the major military force degrades, its collateral damage increases, its ability to separate the guerilla force from civilian population decreses, its ability to take advantage of temporary concentrations of guerillas decreases.

In short, judgment is the crucial quality which allows the major military to occupy, isolate, concentrate. The major military must then maintain judgment in the same way it maintains any other crucial form of readiness.

A surge is a term for a temporary increase in power, in military cases, manpower. This means that the present surge is created and maintained by holding forces in country longer, and by speeding up deployment of forces already scheduled to be sent. As with the 2004 surge with the Fallujah campaign, it has been a dismal failure at the military objectives. According the available information, the US has not secured any of Baghdad. The military situation is, still, a complete stalemate. This is because the very objective of the "surge" was counter to basic doctrine: land is not the key objective. Since Baghdad cannot be physically isolated from the rest of Iraq, removing guerillas from one part of the city merely means they can move to some other part.

It his however burning out the capacity of the occupation forces, and as importantly, it is being paid for by the commensurate reduction in Afghanistan. We are fighting two wars in the Middle East, and losing both of them. It is important to remember that Afghanistan has approximately the same population as Iraq. The basic security requirements will take the same amount of manpower, and since the government that was overthrown by the initial invasion was a cohesive political force, in the long term, the need for political change is going to drive security arrangements.

This double failure, can, again, be traced to the fundamental
plan of Bushism, which was nothing more than Reaganism on steroids: feed money to the wealthy by tax reductions, to a military exurban political core by fiscal stimulus, and use wage deflation to favor a sector of suburbia. The difference is that Reagan had a stock market with a P/E of 8, a double digit inflation rate and an high unemployment rate at the start. It was not difficult to reduce inflation, slosh money to the military/resource extraction sectors of exurbia, and allow asset inflation. It is much harder with a stock market at historical P/E highs, low inflation, and already generationally cheap money.

-:-

We know reach what can be called the point where peripheries are close to the shatter point:

There is apparently some feeling in Washington that it will be left to the United States to clean up the mess. It is as likely that what has happened to the British in Basra is a foretaste of what the allies — the Americans included — may leave behind throughout Iraq.

The grim reality for Brown is that as the British drawdown proceeds, the dangers for our soldiers multiply. The mission also becomes more pointless and morale weakens. That is in marked contrast to, say, Northern Ireland where the army has just completed its long and successful deployment. There the casualty rate fell steadily as commanders adapted their tactics and thwarted the IRA. In Basra the death toll is rising as the mission shrinks — the army will soon be confined to Basra air base alone. It is the enemy that is becoming more sophisticated, with British troops feeling increasingly that they are actually fighting Iran.

This is from a rabidly conservative writer in the Times of London, the Tory outlet for Great Britain. And he is calling for "out! now!" for British forces from Iraq.

The shatter point politically has been reached in the UK, and this is to a great extent, because the shatter point has been reached in Basra. Don't just look at the increase in US fatalities, look at the increase in UK fatalities, these have spiked during the surge, indicating that the entire conception of the operations in Iraq during 2007 have been not only ill-conceived, but have only increased exposure and risk.

Bush has hastened, not delayed, defeat.