Immensely important, shrewd and frightening exposition by George Friedman, on the Stratfor intelligence analysis website, of the deeply alarming position the US has manged to get itself into over its whole war on terror. The strategic framework -- to use the removal of Saddam to force other terror states to alter their behaviour -- was a good one. But the tactical errors in Iraq have brought that strategy to the brink of total disaster:

'The United States intended to occupy Iraq and move on to other campaigns -- but failures in planning, underestimation of the enemy and command failures have turned strategic victory into a tactical nightmare. That tactical nightmare is now threatening to undermine not only the Iraqi theater of operations, but also the entire American war effort. It is threatening to reverse a series of al Qaeda defeats. If the current trend continues, the tactical situation will undermine U.S. strategy in Iraq, and the collapse of U.S. strategy in Iraq could unravel the entire U.S. strategy against al Qaeda and the Islamists. The question is whether the United States has the honesty to face the fact that it is a crisis, the imagination to craft a solution to the problems in Iraq and the luck that the enemy will give it the time it needs to regroup.'

A long string of failures in intelligence, command and judgment has been devastatingly compounded by the prisoner abuse scandal, which has not just sapped morale and self-belief but reinforced the impression that the US doesn't know what it is doing:

'If the United States rapidly adjusts its Iraq operations to take realities in that country into account, rather than engaging on ongoing wishful thinking, the situation in Iraq can be saved and with it the gains made in the war on al Qaeda. On the other hand, if the United States continues its unbalanced and ineffective prosecution of the war against the guerrillas and continues to allow its relations with the Shia to deteriorate, the United States will find itself in an untenable position. If it is forced to withdraw from Iraq, or to so limit its operations there as to be effectively withdrawn, the entire dynamic that the United States has worked to create since the Sept. 11 attacks will reverse itself, and the U.S. position in the Muslim world -- which was fairly strong in January 2004 -- will deteriorate, and al Qaeda's influence will increase dramatically.'

And as if the mistakes on the ground aren't bad enough, the Bush administration has failed to exercise the kind of inspired leadership that could make the case to the country:

'In the midst of the noise over Iraq, it is essential to grasp the strategic balance and to understand that on that level, the United States has done relatively well. To be more precise, al Qaeda has done quite poorly. It is one of the paradoxes of American war-fighting that, having failed to articulate coherent goals, the Bush administration is incapable of pointing to its real successes. But this is an excruciatingly great failure on the part of the administration. It was Napoleon who said, "The moral is to the physical as 3-1," by which he meant that how a nation or army views its successes is more important than what its capabilities are. The failure to tend to the morale of the nation, to articulate a strategy and demonstrate progress, is not a marginal failure. It is the greatest possible failure of political leadership in wartime.'

So the war on terror now rests on a razor's edge:

'It is not clear that the Bush administration understands the crisis it is facing. The prison abuse pictures are symptomatic -- not only of persistent command failure, but also of the administration's loss of credibility with the public...The issue is one of responsibility. Who is responsible for the failures in Iraq? The president appears to have assumed that if anyone were fired, it would be admitting that something went wrong. At this point, there is no one who doesn't know that many things have gone wrong. If the president insists on retaining all of his senior staff, Cabinet members and field commanders, no one is going to draw the conclusion that everything is under control; rather they will conclude that it is the president himself who is responsible for the failures, and they will act accordingly....

'The administration is painting itself into a corner that will cost Bush the presidency if it does not deal with the fact that there is no one who doesn't know that Iraq has been mismanaged. The administration's only option for survival is to start managing it effectively, if that can be done at this point.'

Let's pray someone sticks this analysis under Bush's nose.