Juan Cole today headlines a think piece on Iraq, "Sometimes You are Just Screwed."

I don't disagree. The insurgency has become a meat grinder, but bugging out would mean total defeat. The Army lacks volunteers, and there's no appetite for a draft. It is (as I feared it would be years ago) a Tar Baby, and it's destroying our economy as well as our military.

If that were all that was going wrong it would be bad enough. Vietnam cost 58,000 American lives and Iraq has already wounded one-third that number -- over 12,000 troops, over 6,000 contractors.

Getting into a second Vietnam is bad enough. But that's just one of three terrible fates facing the U.S. today.

The Real Estate Bubble is real. (Illustration from Jokes4u.) Mortgages now cost more than rents in many markets. People are buying 30-year interest-only ARMs that will bankrupt them even if prices stay stable. The new bankruptcy law gives those real estate-spawned bankruptcies a "long tail" -- they will be with us for many, many years. Add $1.5 trillion in debt sold as being government backed, mostly over the last five years by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and you have an even-bigger version of the dot-bomb from five years ago.

Finally, as I've warned many times, there's China. China holds our debt, and China is unstable. Either its own ambitions or its internal problems will cause much of that debt to be recalled. The value of the Yuan will rise, sharply, and that of the dollar will fall.

It's the perfect storm and no one, either in the mainstream press nor in politics, has bothered describing it to you.

Why not?

Because no one, absolutely no one, knows what to do about it. It can't be prevented. The die is cast.

God help the United States of America. It's the only hope we have.