[directinfo]

GLOBAL REPORT
BUSH STARES AT DEFEAT ON THREE FRONTS

The first defeat which President Bush is staring at is the global collapse of the entire US post WW II position. The US is militarily leaving Europe.

The US Grand-Strategic Defeat:

After WW II, the presence of US Armed Forces in western Europe and in Japan made the US into a geo-strategic Empire as the result of victory in war. During the Cold War, the US maintained massive ground forces in Western Europe which were face-to-face with the Soviet Red Army and its empire - the Warsaw Pact. This standoff lasted for decades. Then the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and Germany was re-united into one nation. With that, Europe had regained its old natural geo- political centre. In 1991, the USSR fell into a heap and the Red Army made its historic retreat back inside the borders of historical Russia. The Warsaw Pact crumbled and the eastern European Communist regimes fell like so many dominoes. Then, all the eastern European nations joined the European Union. Europe was whole again - for the first time since the guns of August 1914.

The fact of a continental Europe which was whole again made the continued presence of the US Armed Forces on Europe's soil unviable.

...

Caught Between Two Strategic Chairs:

In its enormous incompetence, the Bush Administration has now placed the US Armed Forces between two strategic chairs. It has vacated the chair which the US Armed Forces held for decades in Europe. But it has not managed to gain a new strategic chair to use with its attempt at a US forward base area in Iraq.

It follows of dire military logic that a US defeat or a retreat from Iraq would leave US Forces with NO place to go. All that would remain would be a return home to the US itself. But to leave both Europe and Iraq - and therefore most of the Middle East - would be a US Grand Strategic retreat of the first order.

The Approaching US Strategic Defeat In Iraq:

The second defeat which President Bush is staring at is the strategic defeat in Iraq. Militarily - "the word" is out and it comes from the US military itself. The US military has been passing a very simple message all over Washington which states that logistically, it would be extremely difficult to sustain the present US forces in Iraq much beyond March or April 2008.

Strategically, this means that the present size of the US Force now in Iraq cannot be sustained with supplies beyond these dates. Militarily, it means that either the US Forces in Iraq have to be scaled down or their supply rates have to be increased rather drastically. Since the latter possibility is not in sight, again because of insufficient means, the US Forces in Iraq will shrink.
A Strategic Appreciation - On Two Levels:

In Baghdad, strategically, President Bush is in the position which Napoleon faced in Moscow with the insurgents burning down the city all around him. Strategically, President Bush is in the position which Hitler faced when his forces were in Stalingrad at the end of a long logistic string while stuck in savage street fighting in the city itself. In President Bush's case, the "logistic string" is the about 500 mile long road land corridor to Kuwait, almost all of which goes through Shiite controlled areas. The US military moves about 3,000 trucks per day as part of its supply operations. Attacks on supply convoys have more than tripled. There were 869 attacks between June 2006 and May this year. That's nearly three a day.
What The Southern Shiites Could Do At Any Time:

If the Shiites in Southern Iraq were to rise up en masse and if they were prepared to pay the price in blood, they could cut this long US land supply corridor in many places and keep it cut by making repeated attacks. President Bush would then face his Stalingrad moment. He would have to try to break the corridor open again - but that would take large new US Forces which are not there to be found. Failing that, he would have to order a break-out from Baghdad right down the same supply road which has been cut and bring his Forces around Baghdad back to Kuwait. If this retreat attempt failed, or if President Bush were to do nothing, he would face losing the entire US Force now in Baghdad.

On The US Home Front:

The third defeat which President Bush is staring at is the simple fact that he has lost the US establishment press. This is a quote from the July 8 editorial in the New York Times: "It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit." The New York Times is (along with the Washington Post) THE US Establishment newspaper. In it can be read the US Establishment's "party line". This is also true of the Washington Post, though from a somewhat different perspective. The fact that the US press has turned against the Bush Administration means that the majority of the US Political Establishment has turned against the Iraq war. The American public turned against the Iraq war months ago. Now, the US Political Establishment has followed. All that remains are the Republicans in the Senate. This week, four more of them turned against the war.

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The USDX goes back to the dawning of the "floating currency" era in 1973. Since then, the warning sign for the US Dollar has always been the 80.00 level on the index. It is true that in the early 1990s, the USDX did briefly close below that 80.00 level, but it was only a few days before it was hauled upwards again. The USDX has NEVER closed below 79.00. Below that level, there are no precedents and therefore no "holding points" in technical analysis terms to stop a sudden and furious fall in the value of the US Dollar. In effect, the Bush Administration has set the stage for this to happen.

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As the US economic recession is beginning to bite across middle America, at the "top" economic level the best way to describe the current economic situation is a mania. US leveraged buyouts have pushed sales of high-risk, high-yield US debt paper up 70 percent to a record $US 1 TRILLION during the first half of the year, according to Bloomberg. That is an annual rate of new high-risk debt being landed on the US financial markets of more than $US 2 TRILLION. Compare that to a US economy with an annual nominal GDP of around $US 13 TRILLION and the scale of the mania becomes very clear.

US banks doubled the amount of CDOs outstanding in the past two years to $US 2.6 TRILLION. A record $US 769 Billion - almost 30 percent of the TOTAL - was sold last year, according to J.P. Morgan.
The Growing Global Debacle:

This US debacle threatens the growth of asset-backed bonds - securities which use consumer, commercial and other loans and receivables as collateral. That market, which includes mortgage securities, has doubled to about $US 10 TRILLION since 2000. The central economic problem here is that throughout this whole enormous outpouring of new credit and therefore debt, rarely if ever has ANY of this "collateral" been marked to MARKET. Rarely has the collateral been offered for sale on the open market. A very old market adage states that all collateral has a valuation, but the only time you know what it is REALLY worth is when you have a PRICE. Getting such a price requires a buyer with money.
The Mania Is Not Just In The US - It Is Global:

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US orders for durable goods, which make up about 55 percent of total factory demand, fell a revised 2.4 percent in May after a 1 percent gain in April. In a preliminary estimate, the US government reported a 2.8 percent decline in durable orders for June. Orders for capital goods excluding aircraft and military equipment, a measure of future business investment, fell 2.1 percent after rising 2.0 percent in April. These are monthly falls which, when annualised, show a drastic rate of contraction of new orders.

This "shear" in the US economy between the "money mechanics" and the broader economic hinterland has not been seen since the early start of the Great Depression. Only the US "top" remains to fall down.

INSIDE THE UNITED STATES
FROM "CAKE WALK" TO "FROG MARCH"

A slowly growing groundswell is rising inside the United States. It is likely to become a tidal wave in the months ahead and sweep President Bush and his Administration from office. Powering this groundswell is the climbing realisation that all the policies followed by the Bush Administration have been a global disaster for America. The question is being asked: "What have they done?" They have launched a war on Iraq, a nation which had nothing to do with 9/11 and which has been conclusively proven not to have had any WMDs since 1991. Before the attack in March 2003, the American people were told that it would be a "cakewalk". If that was true, then how could Iraq have been a mortal danger to the US? The "cakewalk" turned into a "mission accomplished" and an occupation. Now, it is a bloodbath.

The awe-inspiring Lancet study is now more than a year old. It recorded 665,000 dead Iraqis at the time. The death count has likely climbed above a million by now. Four and a half million of Iraq's pre-war population of 26 million are today refugees spread all over the Middle East. More are arriving in these other countries daily. This is a human catastrophe that nearly defeats reason.

The designer of this catastrophe is President Bush and all the senior members of his Administration.

More than one million people dead, many more wounded and more than four million human refugees. Such is the "achievement" of the Bush Administration. All that remains is to frog march them - OUT!
The Last American Pillars Still Standing:

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There is a real, physical contraction in American economic activity. Financial fandangos apart, it will later have to show up as contracting earnings of many American businesses. Once that is finally seen on Wall Street, the US stock markets will have to follow the descending US economy downwards.
Any Fall In The US Dollar Is An INTERNATIONAL Signal:

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Nearly half of the US Navy's 277 warships are stationed close to Iran, according to globalsecurity.org. There is NO doubt that this is a US military deployment for a full-scale attack on IRAN.


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[Grautr]

"In Baghdad, strategically, President Bush is in the position which Napoleon faced in Moscow with the insurgents burning down the city all around him. Strategically, President Bush is in the position which Hitler faced when his forces were in Stalingrad at the end of a long logistic string while stuck in savage street fighting in the city itself. In President Bush's case, the "logistic string" is the about 500 mile long road land corridor to Kuwait, almost all of which goes through Shiite controlled areas. The US military moves about 3,000 trucks per day as part of its supply operations. Attacks on supply convoys have more than tripled. There were 869 attacks between June 2006 and May this year. That's nearly three a day.
What The Southern Shiites Could Do At Any Time:

If the Shiites in Southern Iraq were to rise up en masse and if they were prepared to pay the price in blood, they could cut this long US land supply corridor in many places and keep it cut by making repeated attacks. President Bush would then face his Stalingrad moment. He would have to try to break the corridor open again - but that would take large new US Forces which are not there to be found. Failing that, he would have to order a break-out from Baghdad right down the same supply road which has been cut and bring his Forces around Baghdad back to Kuwait. If this retreat attempt failed, or if President Bush were to do nothing, he would face losing the entire US Force now in Baghdad. "




I dont think any modern military uses a single logistical corridor to supply any size of theatre they are fighting in since the second world war. The Germans used this method and the Allies totaly took advantage of this strategic mistake. Why would the US then adopt it themselves?

[Plantagenet]

I don't see much sign that the U.S. is leaving Europe.

In fact, the planned ABM system in Poland and the Czech Republic represent an expansion of US cooperation with its newest NATO allies.

[strider3700]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Grautr', '
')I dont think any modern military uses a single logistical corridor to supply any size of theatre they are fighting in since the second world war. The Germans used this method and the Allies totaly took advantage of this strategic mistake. Why would the US then adopt it themselves?

[Grautr]

What about air logistics? The US has control of all airbases in Iraq and the British hold the deep water port of Basra. Its true the Shia could cause the same problems you mentioned with supplies from Basra but they cant stop air drops.
You have to remember that the US and allies managed to keep Berlin going after WWII only from the air and they are the only airforce ever who were able to win a war without a follow up ground invasion in Kosavo against the Serbs.

[directinfo]

The Iraq War is lost.

We are hated there. We occupy their holy land with 14 hardened military bases. These people aren't just going to watch us trade our beads for their land as did the American Indians. They have been at war for thousands of years and they don't forget. They are willing to die for their cause. Are we? Ha, we can't think beyond our next hamburger.

We are spraying the place with forever deadly heavy metal poision and 4.5 billion year half life radioactive nanoparticles by the thousands of tons, causing multiple cancers, deformities, deaths... a full-blown population reduction plan in process.

The idea of winning that war is about as smart as how we instigated it, and how we are prosecuting it, and nothing good will come from these efforts, materially or spiritually. A crime of historic proportions not seen before.

[directinfo]

The Privateer brings consistently superb geopolitical and macroeconomic analysis...

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')HE WHITE HOUSE IS AT PANIC STATIONS

The first evidence of this is a spate of changes in travel plans.
President Bush recently cancelled a summit with Southeast
Asian leaders in Singapore. Apart from the APEC Summit
later this year in Australia, he has cancelled all foreign travels.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cancelled a trip to Africa
and decided to avoid a meeting in the Philippines. Defence
Secretary Robert Gates put off a four-nation tour through
Latin America. The catalyst for all this is the fact that the
Bush Administration is losing the war in Iraq politically -
inside the US. From now on, the White House is as much
under siege as is the Green Zone in Baghdad. The American
public has turned solidly against President Bush, giving him
an approval rating of 26 percent. That has made Republicans
in Congress fear that they will go down with the President in
2008. The mainstream press has turned openly against
President Bush. The US military is openly discussing the
various ways a retreat could be made.

[jboogy]

I can't think of anything to add,You covered all the bases with that one,.....Ummmm,.....have you heard Paris Ritchie might have to go back to jail?(trying to imagine a typical americans response to your post)