How do you spell FUBAR, R-U-M-S-F-E-L-D

Jim Lobe in the Asia Times tell us something we knew already, More troops in Iraq, more trouble.

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon's announcement this week that it is adding 12,000 more troops to the approximately 138,000 soldiers it already has in Iraq has put an abrupt end to the fleeting sense of triumph that followed November's "victory" by US Marines who regained control of Fallujah, the main Sunni rebel stronghold.

While the administration sought to spin the decision as a matter of keeping the insurgents "on the run" and backing up security for elections scheduled to take place January 30, most analysts have described the move as an effective admission that Washington's counterinsurgency campaign has not, in fact, been going particularly well.

That conclusion was anticipated to some extent just the day before, as the Pentagon confirmed that 134 US servicemen were killed in November, making it the most lethal month since the March 2003 invasion along with April, when the same number of soldiers were killed battling Sunni rebels and Shi'ite insurgents in Baghdad and in the occupied country's south.

But what about all those crack Iraqi security forces we've trained you ask?

Given the recent disappointing performance of Iraqi police and security forces, the influx of more US troops marks at least a symbolic setback to the larger strategy of "Iraqification", or giving indigenous Iraqi forces more responsibility for maintaining order and keeping the largely Sunni insurrection in check.

"I fear that it signals a 're-Americanization' ... of our strategy in Iraq," retired army Colonel Ralph Hallenback, who worked with the US occupation in 2003, told Thursday's Washington Post.

I don't know about you, but "Iraqification" sounds a lot like "Vietnamization" to me and I'm old enough to remember how well that worked.

But I thought we stopped the insurgency with our "victory" in Falluja you say.

"We now face the plain fact that the insurgency is growing," wrote Joseph Galloway, Ricks' experienced counterpart at Knight Ridder Newspapers, who scorned the claims of one widely quoted senior US military commander that the Fallujah campaign had "broken the back of the insurgency". Galloway noted that rebels had recently been mounting as many as 150 attacks a day - 10 times the number of one year ago.

And of course when ever we talk about what a clusterfuck the occupation of Iraq is we are reminded more and more of that fiasco in the jungle over 30 years ago, Vietnam.

"Why does my mind keep going back to the ... Powell Doctrine," he asked in reference to lessons learned in Vietnam, "which the current civilian leadership in the Pentagon declared dead and gone while they were doing their victory laps and praising their own strategy of smaller, faster, deadlier in the field of military affairs?"

The announcement on troop numbers raises yet another bogeyman from the Vietnam era - the administration's "credibility" in conducting the war, particularly when the top civilian leadership not only had insisted from the start that the number of "boots on the ground" was adequate, but had also ridiculed senior retired and active-duty military officials who publicly warned before the invasion that many more would be needed.

And what about the architect of this fiasco 30 years later? Of course, he keeps his job. This is the Bush administration after all.