What does one write as the final opinion piece for 2006? This year has seen so many big stories around the world. Asia-Pacific has had its fair share.

Forget APEC and Asean. They're just hubristic talk shops, ridiculous dress codes and photo ops. They are venues that create fanfare and images about which nobody cares.

Then there is North Korea. Its crackpot despot, Kim Jong Il is hell-bent on emptying what's left of his country's coffers while he drinks himself in stupid stupor and plunders North Korea's young women.

He'd rather let his people starve to death while he builds nuclear weapons, intent on destroying Japan, South Korea and the United States firm postwar allies, the latter two protectorates of Washington.

Worse is the pitiable way in which the West, led by the US, has so far dealt with that North Korean looney, who, by the way, is being cosseted by China and Russia. With friends like these, and given also how they deal with their critics at home and abroad, Kim must feel comfortable, secure and justified in his neurosis.

One thing this saga tells you, though, is that American power or hegemony, if you wish isn't what most people think it is. Some say American hegemony is waning. They've been saying this for a long time. There's neither novelty nor mileage in regurgitating the sole hegemonic power thesis following the collapse of the Soviet evil empire.

And never mind the plethora of academic and media analyses. However, did all change when the murderous cowards attacked the US, killing thousands of innocent civilians?

Since 9-11 we've seen, clearly, the US suffer from what Paul Kennedy has called imperial overstretch . And stretched it is. This partly explains why the US can neither convincingly nor unilaterally deal with North Korea not in the same way Washington thought it could, wait for it, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Three-wise monkeys stance

Emboldened Islamic terrorists continue to be embedded there and in Pakistan and Indonesia, and to a lesser extent southern Thailand and the southern Philippines.

There's no doubt Iraq has descended into what George W Bush has been furiously denying all along. Iraq is a hellhole not dissimilar to the carnage wrought by American power militarily and diplomatically on Vietnam in the 60s and 70s.

Muslims are wantonly murdering fellow Muslims, albeit of different sects, making it more a civil war. Vietnamese killed Vietnamese, albeit of different political creed.

But Washington, London and Canberra have taken the three-wise monkeys stance on Iraq. It s a bloodletting about which the White House hasn't a clue how to deal.

So much so, day and night, the ghost of Vietnam cuts a wild and bloody swathe across the US's psyche and through the midriff of the 150,000 American ground forces bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, of whom almost 3,000 have lost their lives. For what?

Washington is in a state of denial, the malevolent title, so the White House says, of a book it thinks should be on the fiction, not 'faction', list. It's by The Washington Post 's Bob Woodward who, with his colleague Carl Bernstein, had almost single-handedly brought down the Nixon administration in the mid 1970s.

Woodward tells, from deep inside the bowels of the White House, of the idiocy of the Bush presidency and the hold-the-line harebrained regime.

For all the cockamamie baloney about American superiority, and the comeback of the American century, led by Bushites - aptly titled, by the way - we are seeing, in a very true sense, the growing limits of American power.

The on-off security dialogue with North Korea is apparently on again. In Iraq, Bush may abandon reconciliation talks with the Sunnis. Instead he'll bring the Shi'ites and Kurds to the table.

There's also talk of tripartite talks between Washington, Damascus and Teheran in a bid to exorcise the US's Vietnam ghost in Iraq.

Policy on the run

But these new 'plans', already scoffed by Bush, are about as ingenious as was the plan for regime change in Iraq in the first place.

It says, rather loudly, that the Americans have lost the plot over a war they can not and will not win.

Hard as it may be to swallow for card-carrying looney Bushites, the murdering Islamic terrorists will be the victors, and the ghost of the Iraqi Vietnam will haunt the Washington establishment for decades to come.

Desperately worried about losing the war in Iraq, the White House has been reduced to making Middle East policy on the run. Just listen to the ridiculous soundbites coming from the intellectually lame Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice.

And don't worry about Iraqi prime minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki: like Bush, he too hasn't a clue about how to stop the bloodbath in Iraq, let alone his increasingly fractious and quickly disintegrating government.

Bush and al-Maliki make perfect bedfellows. Yet al-Maliki threw a hissy-fit before meeting Bush in Jordan recently as he has been criticized by US National Security adviser Stephen Hadley.

In a memo leaked to The New York Times , Hadley said: "We returned from Iraq convinced we need to determine if Prime Minister Maliki is both willing and able to rise above the sectarian agendas being promoted by others. Do we and Prime Minister Maliki share the same vision for Iraq? If so, is he able to curb those who seek Shia hegemony or the reassertion of Sunni power? The answers to these questions are key in determining whether we have the right strategy in Iraq."

Don t worry: Bush won t be asking Donald Rumsfeld for advice either. He quit, or was made Bush's scapegoat for US defence policy failure with a hopelessly wonky military strategy and a blind ambition to rid Saddam Hussein and install democracy in Iraq.

That's like asking Moses to split the sea. Led by vice-president Dick Cheney, the hawkish neo-cons had been planning regime change in Iraq well before the first plane hit the World Trade Centre towers.

But for all their John Wayne-like bravado, they ll be left to choke on Saddam's dust long after his impending execution after nothing more than a showcase political trial.

Bloody bedlam and anarchy

The Kurds may talk, and happily, with the US, without the Sunnis and Shi ites, if it means they'll finally get their own homeland, though the Turks won't be happy about that.

All this can only mean one thing: carving up Iraq into three parts.

But will the Sunnis and Shi ites and Kurds let the other draw lines in the desert sands? Like hell they will.

The best strategic assets can't fall in the hands of the other; viz. the world s second biggest oil fields. No way. And not if the Shi'ites, backed by Iran, have anything to say about it, and not the Sunnis, backed by Syria, either.

That leaves the Kurds, who are backed by Washington. Just as Washington had backed the south government in Vietnam against the North and stopped the former from holding popular elections for fear the North would win hands down and then sweep the rest of Southeast Asia in its wake.

If you can't sniff more blood by now, borne by the stupidity of US policy and ignorance in Iraq and in the broader Middle East, then take a good dose of smelling salt.

Its going to be the worse bloody bedlam and anarchy in recent memory. And the West will back right away.

So will the rest of the pathetically hypocritical Muslim world. The bloodletting will be far worse than the Kosovo massacre. When that happens, expect the US, and the rest of the so-called Coalition of the Willing, to cut-and-run just like they did out of their Vietnam ignominy.