For all the mutual backslapping and upbeat talk between George Bush and Nuri al-Malaki, Iraq's prime minister, at their Amman summit, the grim prospect looming for both in Iraq can be summed up in a word: defeat. Mr Malaki's boast that Iraq can be running its own security with its own army and police by June seems bizarre - he couldn't provide four out of six army battalions for the current American-Iraqi security sweep in Baghdad, Operation Together Forward.
The hearty endorsement by Bush of Mr Malaki sounds pretty hollow in view of the bad character given him by national security adviser Stephen Hadley in his confidential report of November 8. In it Hadley accuses Malaki of gross deception or self-deception about the true and parlous state of Iraq's security apparatus, now riven and undermined by militias and death squads.
Bush has returned to default mode on keeping US troops in Iraq "until the job is done". The war there is not civil, says his spokesman, indulging in remarkable semantic gymnastics; at least 3,700 Iraqis died in civil and communal conflict last month. And of course, everyone but Washington is to blame: Hizbullah and Iran for feeding the Shia militias, al-Qaida for abetting the Sunnis, and then of course the Iraqis themselves - including many of those legitimately elected to office.
The clouds of verbiage of exculpation and exoneration cannot conceal the likelihood of American defeat in Iraq swinging from possible to probable. So too is the likelihood of defeat for the aspirations of many Iraqis to find a civilised life in their own land in the near future.
Of course the chances of American troops suffering definitive tactical defeat on the battlefield are slim, as they were in Vietnam. But as in Vietnam America now has to ponder the prospect of strategic defeat, and the strategic defeat in Iraq is likely to have far deeper consequences for the world than the failure in Vietnam in 1975.
These gloomy thoughts have been provoked by a stimulating half-hour talk at the International Institute for Strategic Studies this week by Professor Robert O'Neill, one of the leading strategic analysts around. He said he spoke as a Vietnam veteran, where he served as an intelligence officer with Australian forces, a founder and director of the IISS, professor of military studies at Oxford, and now heading the leading strategic thinktank in his native Australia.
It took this voice from afar to jolt us into considering as a matter of urgency - the consequences, globally and locally, of the failure of the Bush-Blair gambit in Iraq.
The reason why America now faces defeat is because it cannot win. It cannot provide enough troops to secure Baghdad and the other centres, beat the militias and insurgents and build up adequate military and police forces to run the country in the short to medium term. To do so would require America, and Britain, to double present troop numbers in Iraq, at least, get more allies in, improve intelligence and ground appreciation and provide more realistic and better training for local forces.
Neither America nor Britain, respectively, has 140,000 and 7,500 extra troops to spare for the job. The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, said that a substantial reinforcement over time would require introducing the draft in some form, and he is not thinking of doing it. At least, he ruled the draft out for the present, and I think that if things continue to deteriorate across the region, particularly in Afghanistan, I foresee some sort of draft or permanent reserve service being introduced by both America and Britain.
Bush has just said in Jordan that the US would not pull out of Iraq quickly and wants to see some sort of success in Iraq. Bob O'Neill believes in premature American withdrawal from Iraq and is distinctly possible, certainly by any future Democrat president, and even by a fag-end Republican administration. "America does now face defeat," he states bluntly, "and with unpredictable consequences."
The first consequences according to this scenario have a distinctly Hobbesian flavour, "a sudden descent into chaos, and a protracted civil war and insurgency." It is very hard to see any coherent national government exerting authority for years thereafter. Iraq will have gone from the Americans' definition of a rogue state under Saddam to no state at all in the aftermath of their invasion and meddling. Central Iraq, Baghdad, Anbar, Salahadin, in particular will be under the rule of tribe, clan, sect, and terrorist and criminal gang. Remedy and cure will take at least a generation.
The second major consequence will be that the price of oil will go through the roof, and stay there quite a while longer than in previous crises.
Furthermore the increasing chaos in Iraq and weakening of American influence throughout the Middle East will encourage Iran to be more intransigent, and to get nuclear weapons as quickly as possible. The fear is that that the great beached whale of the neocons at the heart of the Bush regime, Dick Cheney, will feel bound to give one last swish of his tail. He has already warned that the administration will not be restrained by a hostile Congress if it feels it is right and necessary to attack Iran.
Bob O'Neill fears that this is distinct possibility - though the consensus at the IISS meeting was that the weakened Bush administration would not try it, not least because there are no troops for the follow-up to air strike with ground action. O'Neill said this is unlikely to deter the Cheney clique.
Retreat from Iraq will weaken America in the eyes of the world and, in particular, with its European allies in Nato. The outcome of the Nato summit in Riga this week will not encourage the Americans, despite the optimistic noises made by Tony Blair about Afghanistan. The Riga meeting looks very much like a game of smoke and cracked mirrors. True, members of alliance agreed to release 2,500 troops for emergency duties throughout Afghanistan. But this does not mean they will sign up automatically to the British and even American plans to go on the offensive against real or imaginary Taliban targets and villages across the south of the country - where the British so-called peace and reconstruction strategy seems to have committed Nato troops to all-out guerrilla warfare in Helmand and its neighbouring provinces.
The question for the Nato partners is still how to operate outside the North Atlantic and northern Europe, the area it was set up originally to defend. Under Bush and Rumsfeld the management of partnerships and alliance became a forgotten art. European scepticism about America will now deepen further, if that is possible. Powers such as France and Spain, and even Germany, will look for alternative frameworks for peace operations, such as the EU defence apparatus. However, few Europeans will be prepared to put adequate resources and funds into the alternatives to Nato. This will leave France, for one, with the ability to break existing strategies and alliances, rather than generate new ones.
For Britain and Blair the implications of the Iraq debacle are as far reaching as for anyone. Britain will pull its forces out of Iraq alongside the Americans, but this won't be fast enough. Individually all three armed services now face a severe crunch in being able to fund, man and resource the range of adventures and operations the Tony Blair grand vision of global security has laid down for them. The army will not have the resources for the missions in Afghanistan and Iraq at their present levels much beyond next spring. If there isn't an improvement in support the RAF will lose some crucial areas of capability, principally in transport, fuelling and medium helicopters, sometime next year. In the eyes of former service chiefs, the Royal Navy faces a crisis of "being viable at all" on present budget projections.
And what of Tony Blair? Like the Road Runner pursued by Wile E Coyote, he'll just have to keep shifting along at great speed to keep ahead of the game. Or he could borrow a bit of that magic potion our cartoon hero uses in extremis - to make himself disappear altogether.
