John Fitzgerald Kennedy occupies a special place in the history of American Presidents, because it can be seen how he was trying to turn a huge ship away from a destructive course, and to better channels. He inherited bad policies, and often fell into the trap of maintaining them - for a time

In 1961, he inherited a policy from Eisenhower and Dulles of breaking our word. We had promised to back reunification of Vietnam, and instead, Dulles backed a strong man by the name of Diem. Much like Chalabi of our own day, he had connections, they thought they could do business with him. Instead of allowing elections we backed his rule in Vietnam, which handed out concessions to his close friends. It sparked a guerilla insurgency that Diem dubbed "the Vietcong". He went to the US for backing.

Kennedy decided to follow through on this policy, and increased military and economic aid to Diem - some $65 Million, almost 390 Million in today's money. He also sent military "advisors" to Vietnam, a fig leaf that fooled no one, they were training the local army to deal with an insurgency, out in the field.

The economic strategy and military strategy introduced in 1962 was to create "strategic hamlets". It was a huge mistake, because it uprooted the peasants from their land, and did little to isolate the guerillas. Diem used this strategy because it allowed him iron control over the new towns, and put his people in charge of each of them.

All this strategy had managed to accomplish was to turn a scattered resistence - numbering only a few thousand fighters, into a 15,000 strong "People's Liberation Army Force". Diem, unpopular with figures in the Kennedy Administration such as Harriman, began to lose support, it was felt that the US was doing what it could, and if matters were going poorly, that it was Diem's fault. That Diem exacted political revenge on his opponents, and was already, in 1962, seen as an unreliable partner, contributed to the atmosphere which lead to increasingly stiff demands from the Kennedy Administration.

In 1963, as a coup was brewing by the military, that promised an end to the insurgency if only they be allowed to put the country on a war footing and "fight", the Kennedy Administration washed its hands of Diem, who was subsequently overthrown and, depending on ones viewpoint, executed - or assasssinated - by the new government.

The US is marching down this same road again - having picked a government that it thought it could "do business with", and found out that those individuals were incapable of providing what Robert McNamara, in his now famous 1964 memorandum to LBJ, called "sufficient security to receive outside aid".

The general pattern, of trying a fig leaf civilian administration, and replacing it with a fully miltary or technocratic one, in the hopes that people who are purely realistic will triumph, is almost always misplaced. Corrupt civilian administrations rise up for deep, but easy to explain, reasons. Namely, there is no path of commerce within the country. Corruption is then how relationships are mediated in the absence of functioning systems: markets, banks, and so on. Replacing those able in the world of black market economics, with those who are not, but instead able at suppression and control, is to replace one problem for another. The circulatory system of the economy is not working. The first method is to keep pumping blood in, the second is CPR with a jack hammer.

What has happened over the last few weeks is a change in US strategy in Iraq. The original strategy of cobbling together opposition groups, and putting them under the control of a well connected, even cronyistic, oligarchy, has been backed away from. There are still hopes among them to return to power later by other means - but the another track has emerged. That track is to put the Baathist functionaries in charge, and put over them a group to monitor their behavior. Such people do, in fact, know how to run Iraq - unlike Chalabi who has clearly shown a complete tone-deafness to local politics. But they only know one way to run Iraq.

History does not repeat itself, so much as mistakes repeat themselves, and then the results of these mistakes recur.

From this we may draw the following predictions: that, under a policy of "Iraqification", the US and UK will place greater and greater control in ad hoc military and security units - as has already been done in Basra, is now being done in Fallujah, and, to some extent in other cities. These ad hoc commanders will form alliances with the resistence elements on the ground - who are by now experienced troops with the knowledge of how to attack and embarass, even if not defeat in open conflict, the occupation army.

The numbers from the US military do not add up. It is impossible to have a small force of "500", kill 600 people "most of whom are military aged males", and still have a viable resistence force that can stand off 3000 heavily armored marines backed by gunships and bombing.

Note that the predictions by many that the US would be able to grind the guerillas down have been completely off the mark. If the causalty ratios presented by the US government were accurate, then these predictions of straight military victory would follow. The US numbers have the US killing at 1:100 in many cases, and at 1:20 at worst. Based on the numbers released from hospitals in Iraq, in early May I estimated that 1:6 was a better fatality ratio, and that based on the superiority of US medicine, that our casualty ratio was closer to 1:3.

That is to say, at that time, we lost one person from combat duty for every three insurgents we removed from combat. While we killed many more of them than they did of ours, they were inflicting disabling wounds at a rate which was far higher. To be blunt: many insurgents died of wounds that, if they had been coalition soldiers, would have been treatable - but would still have been enough to force the soldier from combat.

Later use of heavy artillery, carrier based laser guided bombing, anti-mortar radar, indiscriminate use of gunships and heavy armor upped that ratio back to 1:10 fatalities, and approximately 1:5 casualties. But these are not sustainable numbers.

That which cannot go on: won't.

Based on the numbers from Najaf, the US will have a greater luxury of using hard force against Sadr. Sadr's militia is unable to inflict the ruinous casualty ratios that the the Fallujah resistence was able to. Sadr's militia is approximately 6 months behind: they are still in the realm of suicide bomb attacks, Improvised Explosive Devices and pure ambush. These are effective at producing a bleeding wound in US forces in Baghdad - and their ability to make dramatic scores has increased in recent weeks - but it is not sufficient to fight the US military to a political draw.

However, it should noted that they are only 6 months behind. And in other respects they are ahead in unit identification, ability to maintain law and order, public support, regional support and political will. We are therefore reaching a danger point in Iraq. Fallujah, clearly, is connected with the old al-Tikriti network of supplies, and has found means of recruiting former military personnel - both Saddamist and former resistence - to their cause, they have military cadres from Syria and other Islamic countries. Sadr's military consists of green recruits, has no foreign military cadres. In the last two months however, the increasing use of SAM-7, that is to say, shoulder fired Surface to Air Missiles - shows they have gained a connection to outside supply.

If the experienced commanders and fighters from Fallujah are allowed to train and cross pollinate Sadr's access to recruits, then within a year we will see the same transformation in Iraqi resistence that occured in the Vietcong in the 1959-1962 period.

The inevitable conclusion is that current policy is creating the conditions by which reactionary elements from the old regime can be being rehabilitated, and that their natural course of alliance is with the newly energized and violent groups that are springing up in the wake of US occupation. That this combination could easily lead to a military coup later in the cycle, one which will then impose a government of similar characteristics to Saddam's, though without the expansionist tendencies. Since oil is necessary, the US and others will be forced to do business with this regime.

There is still time to get off this train, but less and less every day.