The Bush administration, having won unanimous approval yesterday of a U.N. Security Council resolution that backs the U.S.-appointed Iraqi leaders, was muted in its celebration -- and for good reason.

"[T]he story of what we've done in the postwar period is remarkable . . . . It is a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day."

US Representative George Nethercutt, 10/13/03 (quoted in The Seattle Times, 10/16/03)

President Bush greeted the vote with one sentence, thanking the Security Council, toward the end of a speech in California and an 80-word written statement. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, while calling it "a great achievement," was careful to add: "I don't see this vote as opening the door to troops."

The 15 to 0 vote, bringing in not just France, Germany and Russia but also Syria, was no small feat. But analysts and diplomats said the impact of the resolution would be limited, and perhaps not worth its cost of exposing the deep-seated resentments in the world community over the U.S. handling of the Iraq war. Few believe the Security Council's resolution will bring much in terms of pledges of troops or aid, even though the Bush administration originally sought the resolution for precisely that reason.

France's permanent representative to the United Nations, Jean-Marc de la Sabliere, underscored that point when he read a statement from France, Germany and Russia calling the resolution "a step in the right direction" but saying it "should have gone further" to broaden the U.N. role and transfer power to Iraqis. "In that context, the conditions are not created for us to envisage any military commitment and any further financial contribution beyond our present engagement."

And Pakistan, from which the administration has eagerly sought troops for Iraq, said the resolution was not good enough. "Under these circumstances, Pakistan will not be able to contribute troops for the multinational force in Iraq," Pakistan's U.N. ambassador, Munir Akram, told the Security Council.

A week ago, some U.S. officials had suggested the administration was on the verge of withdrawing the resolution. That would have been a diplomatic disaster, and might have imperiled the congressional vote on Bush's $87 billion funding request for Iraq and Afghanistan. But a range of analysts said the final vote, while far better than a withdrawal or a resolution approved with numerous abstentions, is too weak to be considered much of a victory.

Dropping the resolution "would have been a colossal slap in the face," said Kenneth M. Pollack, research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. "They successfully avoided a major negative. It is not a major plus."

Almost every expert not on the administration's payroll now sees budget deficits equal to about a quarter of government spending for the next decade, and getting worse after that.

Yet the administration insists that there's no problem, that economic growth will solve everything painlessly. And that puts those who want to stop the looting — which should include anyone who wants this country to avoid a Latin-American-style fiscal crisis, somewhere down the road — in a difficult position. Faced with a what-me-worry president, how do you avoid sounding like a dour party pooper?

One answer is to explain that the administration's tax cuts are, in a fundamental sense, phony, because the government is simply borrowing to make up for the loss of revenue. In 2004, the typical family will pay about $700 less in taxes than it would have without the Bush tax cuts — but meanwhile, the government will run up about $1,500 in debt on that family's behalf.

George W. Bush is like a man who tells you that he's bought you a fancy new TV set for Christmas, but neglects to tell you that he charged it to your credit card, and that while he was at it he also used the card to buy some stuff for himself. Eventually, the bill will come due — and it will be your problem, not his.

Still, those who want to restore fiscal sanity probably need to frame their proposals in a way that neutralizes some of the administration's demagoguery. In particular, they probably shouldn't propose a rollback of all of the Bush tax cuts.

Here's why: while the central thrust of both the 2001 and the 2003 tax cuts was to cut taxes on the wealthy, the bills also included provisions that provided fairly large tax cuts to some — but only some — middle-income families. Chief among these were child tax credits and a "cutout" that reduced the tax rate on some income to 10 percent from 15 percent.

These middle-class tax cuts were designed to create a "sweet spot" that would allow the administration to point to "typical" families that received big tax cuts. If a middle-income family had two or more children 17 or younger, and an income just high enough to take full advantage of the provisions, it did get a significant tax cut. And such families played a big role in selling the overall package.

So if a Democratic candidate proposes a total rollback of the Bush tax cuts, he'll be offering an easy target: administration spokespeople will be able to provide reporters with carefully chosen examples of middle-income families who would lose $1,500 or $2,000 a year from tax-cut repeal. By leaving the child tax credits and the cutout in place while proposing to repeal the rest, contenders will recapture most of the revenue lost because of the tax cuts, while making the job of the administration propagandists that much harder.

Purists will raise two objections. The first is that an incomplete rollback of the Bush tax cuts won't be enough to restore long-run solvency. In fact, even a full rollback wouldn't be enough. According to my rough calculations, keeping the child credits and the cutout while rolling back the rest would close only about half the fiscal gap. But it would be a lot better than current policy.

The ambitious aim of the American war in Iraq—articulated by Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and other neoconservative defense intellectuals—was to effect a fundamental transformation in Middle East politics. The war was not—or not principally—about finding weapons of mass destruction, or preventing alliances with al Qaeda, or protecting the Iraqi population from Saddam’s terror. For U.S. policy makers the importance of such a transformation was brought home by the events of September 11, which challenged U.S. strategy in the region by compromising the longstanding U.S. alliance with Saudi Wahhabis. In response to this challenge, the Bush administration saw the possibility of creating a new pillar for U.S. policy in the region: a post-Baathist Iraq, dominated by Iraqi Shiites, which would spark a wave of democratization across the Middle East. . . .

In removing the Baath regime and eliminating constraints on Iraqi Islamism, the United States has unleashed a new political force in the Gulf: not the upsurge of civic organization and democratic sentiment fantasized by American neoconservatives, but the aspirations of Iraqi Shiites to build an Islamic republic. That result was an entirely predictable consequence of the past 30 years of political conflict between the Shiites and the Baathist regime, and American policy analysts have expected a different result only by ignoring that history.

To be sure, the dreams of a Shiite Islamic republic in Baghdad may be unrealistic: a plurality of the country is Sunni, and some proportion of the 14 million Shiites is secularist. In the months after the Anglo-American invasion, however, the religious Shiite parties demonstrated the clearest organizational skills and established political momentum. The Islamists are likely to be a powerful enough group in parliament that they may block the sort of close American-Iraqi cooperation that the neoconservatives had hoped for. The spectacle of Wolfowitz’s party heading out of Najaf just before the outbreak of a major demonstration of 10,000 angry Sadrists, inadvertently provoked by the Americans, may prove an apt symbol for the American adventure in Iraq. The August 29 bombing in Najaf deeply shook the confidence of Shiites in the American ability to provide them security, and provoked anger against the United States that will take some time to heal.

In addition, the Saudis cannot be pushed out of the oil picture so easily. It will be years before Iraq can produce much more than three to five million barrels a day. A good deal of that petroleum, and much of the profit from it, will be needed for internal reconstruction and debt servicing. It would take a decade and a half to two decades for Iraqi capacity to achieve parity with that of the Saudis (11 million barrels a day), and even then they will not have the Saudis’ low overhead and smaller native population. The Saudis can choose to produce only seven million of the 76 million barrels of petroleum pumped in the world every day, or they can produce 11 million. That flexibility, along with their clout in the OPEC cartel, lets them exercise a profound influence on the price, and Iraq will not be able to counterbalance it soon. Neoconservative fears about Saudi complicity with al Qaeda are also overdrawn, since the Saudi elite feels as threatened by the Sunni radicals as the United States does. High Saudi officials have even expressed regret about their past support for the Muslim Brotherhood, which they now see as dangerous in a way that mainstream Wahhabism is not. (Would that Reaganite supporters of the mujahidin were similarly contrite!) So the U.S. alliance with the House of Saud, however badly shaken by September 11 and Wahhabi radicalism, will provide an essential foundation for world petroleum stability into the indefinite future.

For now, the United States is back to having two footstools in the Middle East: Israel and Saudi Arabia. Iraq has proven too rickety, too unknown, too devastated to bear the weight of the strategic shift imagined by the hawks. And far from finally defeating Khomeinism, U.S. policy has given it millions of liberated Iraqi allies. Their new Iraqi Interim Governing Council has declined to recognize Israel, citing Iraq’s membership in the Arab League and lack of genuine progress toward a Palestinian state. Al Qaeda and allied terrorist threats were not countered by the invasion of Iraq.

Whether Iraq’s Sunnis will turn to radicalism and reinforce al Qaeda is as yet unknown. But what does seem clear is that the Iraq war has proved a detour in the War on Terror, drawing away key resources from the real threat of al Qaeda and continued instability in Afghanistan. The old pillars have proven more resilient than the hawks imagined. What really needs to be changed are U.S. support for political authoritarianism and Islamic conservatism, and acquiescence in Israeli land grabs on the West Bank. Those two, together, account for most of the trouble the United States has in the Muslim world. The Iraq war did nothing to change that.

WASHINGTON - Concerned about the appearance of disarray and feuding within his administration as well as growing resistance to his policies in Iraq, President Bush -- living up to his recent declaration that he is in charge -- told his top officials to "stop the leaks" to the media, or else.

News of Bush's order leaked almost immediately.

Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he "didn't want to see any stories" quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.

An escalating turf war involving Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has generated an unusually bountiful crop of leaks in recent months, and one result is a criminal investigation of anonymous officials in the White House who are alleged to have leaked the name of a CIA covert officer.

The infighting, backstabbing and maneuvering on such major foreign-policy issues as North Korea, Syria, Iran and postwar Iraq have escalated to a level that veterans of government say they have not seen in years. At one point, the senior official said, Bush himself asked how bad it was.

"This isn't as bad as [George] Shultz vs. [Caspar] Weinberger, is it?" he asked, referring to a legendary Reagan administration rivalry between secretaries of state and defense. One top official reportedly nodded and said it was "way worse." . . .

"What's most revealing is the extent of frustration taking hold," said historian Robert Dallek of Boston University, a biographer of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy. "It's really reminiscent of Johnson and Vietnam. Members of the Senate . . . and the media were giving him grief. It sounds like Bush is falling into that pattern. He's blaming the media, much like Johnson did."

The spirit of US President George W Bush has been trapped in a clay pot and tossed into a river in northern Thailand after being cursed by hundreds of farmers protesting US agriculture policy.

A photograph of the US leader was sealed inside a pot amid black magic mantra chants, then tossed into the Ping River on Friday by demonstrators after they rallied at the US consulate in Chiang Mai, a farm group leader said.

"This is a traditional northern Thai ceremony aimed at keeping his spirit down on the riverbed so he could not come and exploit our natural resources or suppress our (farming) brothers with his superior influence," Weerasak Wan-ubol, an executive of the Northern Farmers Alliance, said today.

The 300 protesters, claiming to represent 20,000 members from seven northern provinces, railed against imminent plans for a free-trade agreement between Thailand and the United States.

The act was also a protest against Washington's military intervention in sovereign nations, the Bangkok Post reported.

A respected elder performed the voodoo rites, inscribing ancient Khmer scripts on the pot, aimed at trapping the spirit of the US president.

WASHINGTON — A suspicious sample of biological material recently found by U.S. weapons hunters in Iraq probably was purchased legally from a U.S. organization in the 1980s and is a substance that has never been successfully used to produce a weapon, experts said.

The discovery of the hidden vial of C. botulinum Okra B, which was revealed in an Oct. 2 interim report by chief U.S. weapons hunter David Kay, was highlighted in speeches by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other senior administration officials as proof that President Saddam Hussein's government maintained an illicit bio-weapons program before the war. . . .

The single vial of botulinum B had been stored in an Iraqi scientist's kitchen refrigerator since 1993. It appears to have been produced by a nonprofit Virginia biological resource center, the American Type Culture Collection, which legally exported botulinum and other biological material to Iraq under a Commerce Department license in the late 1980s.

The vial of botulinum B — about 2 inches high and half an inch wide — was the only suspicious biological material Kay reported finding. It was sealed and stored in the scientist's home with 96 other apparently benign vials of single-cell proteins and biopesticides.

In his 13-page declassified report, Kay said "a biological agent" could be produced from the botulinum sample. Speaking to reporters at the White House the next day, Oct. 3, Bush said the war in Iraq was justified and cited Kay's discovery of the advanced missile programs, clandestine labs and what he called "a live strain of deadly agent botulinum" as proof that Hussein was "a danger to the world."

But Dr. David Franz, a former chief U.N. biological weapons inspector who is considered among America's foremost experts on biowarfare agents, said there was no evidence that Iraq or anyone else has ever succeeded in using botulinum B for biowarfare.

"The Soviets dropped it [as a goal] and so did we, because we couldn't get it working as a weapon," said Franz, who is the former commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick, Md., the Pentagon's lead laboratory for bioweapons defense research.

"From the weapons side, it's not something to be concerned about," agreed Dr. Raymond Zilinskas, another former U.N. inspector who is now director of the chemical and biological weapons nonproliferation program at the Monterey Institute in California.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 — A yearlong State Department study predicted many of the problems that have plagued the American-led occupation of Iraq, according to internal State Department documents and interviews with administration and Congressional officials.

Beginning in April 2002, the State Department project assembled more than 200 Iraqi lawyers, engineers, business people and other experts into 17 working groups to study topics ranging from creating a new justice system to reorganizing the military to revamping the economy.

Their findings included a much more dire assessment of Iraq's dilapidated electrical and water systems than many Pentagon officials assumed. They warned of a society so brutalized by Saddam Hussein's rule that many Iraqis might react coolly to Americans' notion of quickly rebuilding civil society.

Several officials said that many of the findings in the $5 million study were ignored by Pentagon officials until recently, although the Pentagon said they took the findings into account. The work is now being relied on heavily as occupation forces struggle to impose stability in Iraq.

The working group studying transitional justice was eerily prescient in forecasting the widespread looting in the aftermath of the fall of Mr. Hussein's government, caused in part by thousands of criminals set free from prison, and it recommended force to prevent the chaos.

"The period immediately after regime change might offer these criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of killing, plunder and looting," the report warned, urging American officials to "organize military patrols by coalition forces in all major cities to prevent lawlessness, especially against vital utilities and key government facilities."

Despite the scope of the project, the military office initially charged with rebuilding Iraq did not learn of it until a major government drill for the postwar mission was held in Washington in late February, less than a month before the conflict began, said Ron Adams, the office's deputy director.

The man overseeing the planning, Tom Warrick, a State Department official, so impressed aides to Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general heading the military's reconstruction office, that they recruited Mr. Warrick to join their team.

George Ward, an aide to General Garner, said the reconstruction office wanted to use Mr. Warrick's knowledge because "we had few experts on Iraq on the staff."

But top Pentagon officials blocked Mr. Warrick's appointment, and much of the project's work was shelved, State Department officials said. Mr. Warrick declined to be interviewed for this article. . . .

The broad outlines of the work, called the Future of Iraq Project, have been widely known, but new details emerged this week after the State Department sent Congress the project's 13 volumes of reports and supporting documents, which several House and Senate committees had requested weeks ago.

The documents are unclassified but labeled "official use only," and were not intended for public distribution, officials said. But Congressional officials from both parties allowed The New York Times to review the volumes, totaling more than 2,000 pages, revealing previously unknown details behind the planning.

Administration officials say there was postwar planning at several government agencies, but much of the work at any one agency was largely disconnected from that at others. . . .

A review of the work shows a wide range of quality and industriousness. For example, the transitional justice working group, made up of Iraqi judges, law professors and legal experts, has met four times and drafted more than 600 pages of proposed reforms in the Iraqi criminal code, civil code, nationality laws and military procedure. Other working groups, however, met only once and produced slim reports or none at all. . . .

The groups' ideas may not have been fully incorporated before the war, but they are getting a closer look now. Many of the Iraqi ministers are graduates of the working groups, and have brought that experience with them. Since last spring, new arrivals to Mr. Bremer's staff in Baghdad have received a CD-ROM version of the State Department's 13-volume work. "It's our bible coming out here," said one senior official in Baghdad.

MANILA, Oct. 18 — President Bush told the Congress of this former American colony on Saturday that Iraq, like the Philippines, could be transformed into a vibrant democracy. He also pledged his help in remaking the troubled and sometimes mutinous Philippine military into a force for fighting terrorism.

In an eight-hour visit, Mr. Bush for the first time drew explicit comparisons between the transition he is seeking in Iraq and the rough road to democracy that the Philippines traveled from the time the United States seized it from Spain in 1898 to the present day

BANGKOK, Oct. 19 — Under pressure from potential donors, the Bush administration will allow a new agency to determine how to spend billions of dollars in reconstruction assistance for Iraq, administration and international aid officials say.

The new agency, to be independent of the American occupation, will be run by the World Bank and the United Nations. They are to announce the change at a donor conference in Madrid later this week.

"Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, proudly announced the reopening of Iraq?s schools this month, while White House officials point to the opening of Iraq?s 240 hospitals. In fact, many schools were already open in May, once major combat ended, and no major hospital closed during the war. But that didn?t stop a group of Republican senators from tearing into American reporters covering Iraq earlier this month. ?I was not told by the media... that thousands and thousands of Iraqi schoolchildren went back to school,? said Larry Craig of Idaho, who recently toured Iraq. The senator neglected to mention that he slept both nights of his trip in Kuwait, not Iraq."

-- Richard Wolffe and Rod Nordland, "Bush's News War," Newsweek, 10/27/03

The change effectively establishes some of the international control over Iraq that the United States opposed in the drafting of the United Nations Security Council resolution that passed on Thursday. That resolution referred to two previously established agencies devised to ensure that all aid would be monitored and audited.

But diplomats say other countries were unwilling to make donations because they saw the United States as an occupying power controlling Iraq's reconstruction and self-rule.

The change, supported by L. Paul Bremer III, the chief occupation administrator in Baghdad, is meant to assure them as his team labors to reconstruct Iraq. . . .

American reconstruction aid, like the proposed $20 billion that President Bush is struggling to get through Congress, would go to the previously set up entity, the Development Fund for Iraq, which is run by the occupation administrators and the Iraqis. Other resources are to come from Iraqi oil revenues. This fund has given big contracts to American companies like Halliburton and Bechtel.

But the new agency could open up that process and award contracts through bidding practices open to global companies. Donors could also give directly to Iraq, specifying that their own companies do the work. . . .

At first, the Defense Department, which runs the occupation, resisted handing over financial control of Iraq's rebuilding. Instead, the Pentagon set up the Development Fund for Iraq, which is recognized by a United Nations Security Council resolution in May.

The fund was to work in tandem with another agency, the United Nations' International Advisory and Monitoring Board, which was given auditing functions and no say in spending. That setup, reiterated in the United Nations resolution of Thursday, has proved inadequate to assuage donors.

The administration changed its mind in recent weeks, in part because of the support of Mr. Bremer.

"We had to act because the international community was stonewalling us on aid," said an administration official. According to the official, Mr. Bremer said, " `I need the money so bad we have to move off our principled opposition to the international community being in charge.' "

A senior State Department official said the United States would still be consulted in the spending of aid money, for example to avoid duplication of spending.

"The donors all want to have a little bit of distance from us," the official said. "That's fine. But you can't really do much of anything without some coordination with us."

World Bank and United Nations officials said the new reconstruction agency would work closely with the Iraqi ministries set up by the Iraqi Governing Council, the 25-member body picked by the American occupation.

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered.

The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went on, was that the intelligence reports about Iraq provided by the United Nations inspection teams and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitored Iraq’s nuclear-weapons programs, were far more accurate than the C.I.A. estimates. “Some of the old-timers in the community are appalled by how bad the analysis was,” the official said. “If you look at them side by side, C.I.A. versus United Nations, the U.N. agencies come out ahead across the board.” . . .

In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government’s customary procedures for vetting intelligence.

A retired C.I.A. officer described for me some of the questions that would normally arise in vetting: “Does dramatic information turned up by an overseas spy square with his access, or does it exceed his plausible reach? How does the agent behave? Is he on time for meetings?” The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports—sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions. In theory, no request for action should be taken directly to higher authorities—a process known as “stovepiping”—without the information on which it is based having been subjected to rigorous scrutiny.

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.”

The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet”—the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.”

The nation's public universities raised tuitions by 14 percent this year, the steepest increase in at least a quarter century, if not significantly longer, according to the latest annual survey by the College Board.

Tuition at community colleges across the country also rose 14 percent, the second largest increase since 1976, the earliest year for which the College Board reports data.

In both cases, the increases, which come out to 13 percent when adjusted for inflation, were largely driven by cuts in state spending on education, the College Board said.

Private universities raised tuitions by 6 percent, itself not an unusual increase in recent years. But after adjusting for inflation, 2003 was the third consecutive year that private universities raised tuitions by at least 5 percent, more than twice the rate of inflation.

The last time a series of comparable increases occurred was in the mid-1980's, when families were enjoying a much healthier economy than they are now.

As a result of the increases, tuitions reached an average of $19,710 at private colleges, $4,694 at public universities and $1,905 at community colleges, more than twice what these institutions cost 20 years ago, even after adjusting for inflation.

TEHRAN, Oct. 21 — Iran agreed Tuesday, after months of resistance, to accept stricter international inspections of its nuclear sites and to suspend production of enriched uranium, which can be used to develop nuclear weapons.

But Tehran gave no indication when it would suspend uranium enrichment or sign, ratify and carry out an additional agreement under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968 that would allow surprise inspections of its nuclear installations.

The accord was completed in Tehran during an unusual visit by three European foreign ministers, Dominique de Villepin of France, Jack Straw of Britain and Joschka Fischer of Germany.

The ministers expressed hope that it would help defuse a diplomatic crisis that pitted Iran against the International Atomic Energy Agency and, increasingly, the world because of concerns that Iran is determined to become a nuclear power.

In a news conference with the three ministers, Hassan Rowhani, a powerful middle-level cleric who has emerged as Iran's chief negotiator during the current crisis, said the one-and-a-half-page agreement would first have to be approved by Iran's elected Parliament.

He emphasized that the suspension of uranium enrichment would be for an "interim period."

In Washington, the State Department reacted skeptically to the agreement, with officials privately voicing concerns that Tehran would not fully comply. Officials there only grudgingly praised the work of their European colleagues. . . .

Bush administration officials dismissed the notion that a less confrontational approach by the Europeans had yielded more tangible results than the administration's policy of ultimatums. They insisted that the agreement merely buttressed the American policy, and said they had kept in touch with the Europeans throughout the initiative. . . .

The European initiative grew out of a letter drafted by France and sent by the three ministers to Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, in August. It urged Iran to adopt a protocol to the nonproliferation treaty that provides for intrusive inspections on short notice, and to halt its uranium enrichment program.

In return, the letter acknowledged Iran's right to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and raised the possibility of cooperation on technology, without specifically pledging help with a civilian nuclear energy program.

The agreement on Tuesday came swiftly, apparently enjoying the support of conservatives as well as reformers in Iran's divided leadership.

ASHINGTON, Oct. 21 — Attorney General John Ashcroft's top aides have regularly briefed him on key details in the investigation into the disclosure of a C.I.A. officer's identity, including the identities of those interviewed by the F.B.I., a senior Justice Department official told members of Congress on Tuesday.

Mr. Ashcroft's regular, detailed briefings suggest that he has taken a more hands-on role in the politically charged investigation than the department had acknowledged. Senate Democrats said the arrangement threatened to compromise the independence of the investigation, a contention that Justice Department officials rejected.

Mr. Ashcroft has been given all the details needed "for him to understand meaningfully what's going on in the investigation," Christopher Wray, a political appointee who heads the Justice Department's criminal division, said at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee under sharp questioning from several Democrats who want Mr. Ashcroft to recuse himself from the case.

That information, Mr. Wray said, includes the names of those interviewed since the Justice Department opened its investigation three weeks ago into whether senior Bush administration officials illegally leaked the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer to the syndicated columnist Robert Novak. The officer's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, has been a vocal critic of the administration's Iraqi policies, and Mr. Wilson has suggested that the White House publicized his wife's work at the C.I.A. in an effort to intimidate him.

Mr. Ashcroft and his aides have stressed repeatedly that the department's career attorneys are being left to run the investigation free of political hindrance.

But Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said he was troubled to learn from Mr. Wray at Tuesday's hearing that the attorney general is receiving regular reports on the status of the inquiry and has been told whom the F.B.I. is interviewing. Mr. Schumer said the attorney general's close personal and political ties to the White House pose a potential conflict if Mr. Ashcroft knows the White House officials investigators plan to interview.

"When the line prosecutors know that the attorney general knows what they are doing, it could hamper their independence," Mr. Schumer said in an interview. "It means someone is watching over them, and that's not what we want in a case like this. It has a chilling effect, and it makes the case for Ashcroft recusing himself stronger."

In a private memo sent last week to his closest Pentagon associates, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld called into question his department's efforts to win the war on terrorism, and said it might be necessary to fashion "a new institution" that could better focus the government's campaign.

He said the Pentagon had not "yet made truly bold moves" to reshape itself for the ongoing war and said "relatively little effort" had gone into developing "a long-range plan" to defeat terrorism. He also said the United States even lacks a good set of measures to determine how well it is doing in the war. . . .

Most of the memo consisted of questions rather than specific proposals. It was addressed to four people: Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary; Douglas J. Feith, the Pentagon's undersecretary for policy; Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the vice chairman.

Surprised by the release of the document, Pentagon and White House officials sought to depict it as evidence simply of Rumsfeld doing his job to compel the armed forces to adapt to new threats. . . .

The memo echoed a theme that Rumsfeld has voiced repeatedly in the past two years -- concern that the Department of Defense, originally geared to fight big militaries around the world, is too big and slow to effectively fight small groups of terrorists. But Rumsfeld signaled fresh worries that some of the measures taken so far, such as greater use of agile special operations forces, have been "too modest and incremental." . . .

"The U.S. is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan," Rumsfeld said, "but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."

In one particularly cryptic line near the end of the memo, Rumsfeld asked: "Does the CIA need a new finding?" A finding, signed by the president, provides authority to conduct whatever covert activity is stipulated. Rumsfeld did not indicate the covert activity he had in mind.

TO: Gen. Dick Myers, Paul Wolfowitz, Gen. Pete Pace, Doug Feith

FROM: Donald Rumsfeld

SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism

The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?

DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere -- one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.

With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be: We are having mixed results with Al Qaeda, although we have put considerable pressure on them -- nonetheless, a great many remain at large.

USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis. USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban -- Omar, Hekmatyar, etc. With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started. Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the U.S.? Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror? Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental?

My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?

Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us? Does the U.S. need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists?

The U.S. is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions. Do we need a new organization? How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools? Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?

It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog. Does CIA need a new finding? Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madrassas to a more moderate course? What else should we be considering?

Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday. Thanks.

WHERE IS the energy bill? According to spokesmen for the House and Senate energy committees -- whose staffs have been writing the bill -- the legislation is now finished, except for a few sections on taxes. Yet although this bill may become law in a few days, no Democrats, few Republicans and even fewer members of the public have seen it: The bill's language will be released, committee chairmen now say, no earlier than 48 hours before a possible vote -- an improvement over the 24 hours originally promised, but not much. There appears to be no plausible explanation for this deep veil of silence -- except possibly embarrassment. For the past several weeks, members of Congress have scrambled to stuff last-minute provisions that benefit their districts or their local industries into this piece of legislation: Perhaps they don't want anyone to find out about them before it's too late.

That, at any rate, is the only conclusion that can be drawn when we hear about measures such as the one Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) is proposing to include in the bill. Mr. Barton's amendment would, according to his staff, merely allow the Environmental Protection Agency to give urban areas more time to meet air pollution deadlines set out in the Clean Air Act. No one denies that this measure is intended to apply to that section of the Dallas-Fort Worth region contained in Mr. Barton's district -- an area known for its high number of air-polluting industries. The trouble is, the change would affect the air quality in the entire region and might affect the enforcement of the Clean Air Act across the country. Among those affected, for example, are the Dallas constituents of Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), who first learned that this measure was included in the energy bill from the Dallas Morning News editorial Web log.

This provision was not in either version of the energy bill originally passed by the House and the Senate. Few of the citizens of Dallas have been acquainted with this measure, and Mr. Barton has not gone out of his way to talk about it. As of yesterday afternoon, for example, we were unable to find information about the measure on the congressman's Web site. Mr. Barton is able to stuff this damaging legislation into this already pork-laden bill only because he is on the conference committee that, in this Congress, effectively meets in secret. Is that democracy?

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 — House Republican leaders are nearing agreement on a bill to give nearly $60 billion in additional tax breaks to corporations, brushing aside Democratic complaints that the measure would deepen the federal budget deficit.

According to a draft circulated among Republican lawyers, the bill, which is expected to come up for a vote next week at the House Ways and Means Committee, would gradually reduce the corporate tax rate for most companies from 35 to 32 percent.

It would also relax or abolish a number of longstanding tax regulations on foreign profits of American multinationals, a move that Congressional tax analysts say could save companies more than $40 billion in taxes over the next decade. . . .

The proposals are in the latest draft of a bill to replace a tax break for American exporters that the World Trade Organization has declared an illegal trade subsidy. The European Union has threatened to retaliate with up to $4 billion a year in tariffs on American products if the United States fails to repeal the old break.

But the original issue has become a magnet for lobbying from competing business groups, all looking to either protect their existing tax breaks or obtain some new ones.

According to a new report by the Center for Responsive Politics, a group that scrutinizes campaign finance, companies in one or another of the coalitions lobbying over this issue contributed $753,000 to members of the Senate Finance Committee and $700,000 to members of the House Ways and Means Committee in the first half of 2003.

In an attempt to placate as many groups as possible, the House proposal would repeal the original export tax break for what is known as extraterritorial income and replace it with a broader array of corporate tax breaks worth more than twice as much.

Repealing the old tax break would bring the Treasury about $50 billion over 10 years, and the bill would raise nearly $30 billion more by blocking a variety of tax shelters and loopholes. But the new tax breaks would be worth about $142 billion over 10 years, leaving the net cost to the government at about $60 billion over the next decade. . . .

House Democrats have vowed to fight the Republican proposal, charging that it would worsen the federal deficit and provide additional tax incentives for companies to build factories and shift jobs overseas.

MADISON, N.J. — The chairman of the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks said the White House was continuing to withhold several highly classified intelligence documents from the panel and that he was prepared to subpoena the documents if they were not turned over within weeks.

Thomas Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, also said in an interview that he believed the bipartisan 10-member commission would soon be forced to issue subpoenas to other executive branch agencies because of continuing delays by the Bush administration in providing documents and other evidence.

"Any document that has to do with this investigation cannot be beyond our reach," Kean said Friday.

It was Kean's first public warning to the White House that it risked a subpoena and a politically damaging courtroom showdown over access to the documents, including intelligence reports that reached President Bush in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I will not stand for it," Kean said in the interview in his offices here at Drew University, where he is president. "That means that we will use every tool at our command to get hold of every document." . . .

Kean's comments Friday came as another member of the commission, Max Cleland, a former Democratic senator from Georgia, became the first panel member to say publicly that the commission could not complete its work by its deadline and the first to accuse the White House of withholding classified information from the panel for purely political reasons.

"It's obvious that the White House wants to run out the clock here," he said. "It's Halloween, and we're still in negotiations with some assistant White House counsel about getting these documents — it's disgusting."

He said the White House and Bush's re-election campaign had reason to fear what the commission was uncovering in its investigation of intelligence and law enforcement failures before Sept. 11.

"As each day goes by," Cleland said, "we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before Sept. 11 than it has ever admitted."

Interviews with several other members of the commission show that Kean's concerns are widely shared on the panel, and that the concern is bipartisan.

Slade Gorton, a Republican member of the panel who served as a U.S. senator from Washington from 1982 to 2000, said he was startled by the "indifference" of some executive branch agencies in making material available to the commission.

"This lack of cooperation, if it extends anywhere else, is going to make it very difficult" for the commission to finish its work by next May, he said.

Timothy Roemer, president of the Center for National Policy in Washington and a former Democratic member of the House from Indiana, said "our May deadline may, in fact, be jeopardized."

"Many of us are frustrated that we're still dealing with questions about document access when we should be sinking our teeth into hearings and to making recommendations for the future," Roemer said.

Congress would need to approve an extension if the panel requested one, a potentially difficult proposition given the reluctance of the White House and many senior Republican lawmakers to see the commission created in the first place.

"If the families of the victims weighed in — and heavily, as they did before — then we'd have a chance of succeeding," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who was a sponsor of the legislation creating the commission.

He said that, given the "obfuscation" of the administration in meeting document requests, he was ready to pursue an extension "if the commission feels it can't get its work done."

As our casualties continue to mount, America's leaders could do themselves and us a favor by calling things by their right names. What's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan today is not nation-building. It's not postwar reconstruction. It's not pacification. It's war.

It's not war just because both nations are crawling with troops. So are others. Nor is it war just because people continue to die violently. That happens every day in every city in the world. Nor is it war just because some of the victims wear uniforms. That too is not uncommon even in peacetime.

It's war because our undefeated enemies say it is and behave accordingly.

In that stubborn resistance lies a fundamental truth that seems too often to have eluded American political leaders since World War II: It's not the winner who typically decides when victory in a war has been achieved. It's the loser. . . .

Having dealt ourselves the cards in our hand, we have little choice but to play them. In Iraq, that may eventually produce something resembling victory, although at a final cost we can't yet compute. In Afghanistan, it may depend more on Pakistan than on us, unless we are willing to invest a good deal more military power than we have so far.

But the more pertinent question is what we will take away from these two exercises about the business of fighting wars. Putting aside the question of whether invading Iraq was necessary, both wars might have been fought quite differently from the way they were, in a way that took the loser's acceptance less for granted and therefore was considerably more ruthless about achieving it.

Fighting that way certainly would have exacted a stiffer price up front, from us and from those we invaded. It is at least possible, though, that the price might still have been cheaper than the one we could end up paying in the long run.

Car bombers attacked the international Red Cross headquarters and four police stations across Baghdad today, killing around 40 people.

A suicide bomber drove an ambulance packed with explosives into security barriers outside the Red Cross at around 8.30am local time (0530 GMT), killing 12 people, the aid agency said.

Then in police station bombings through the morning, 27 people, mostly Iraqis and one US solider, were killed, Iraqi police said.

The capital has now seen the worst two day of violence since the war was declared over in April and the sound of sirens reverberated through the streets this morning as emergency vehicles criss-crossed the city.

The bombings came during a morning of apparently choreographed attacks by Iraqi resistance guerrillas that appears to have been timed to coincide with the first day of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. . . .

Other Iraqis, meanwhile, were reported to have been killed at the hands of Americans. In Fallujah, 65km (40 miles) west of Baghdad, witnesses said US troops opened fire indiscriminately, killing at least four Iraqi civilians, after a roadside bomb exploded as a US military convoy passed. The US command did not immediately confirm the incident or any US casualties. . . .

The terror attacks came hours after clashes in the Baghdad area killed three US soldiers overnight, and a day after an audacious rocket salvo attack on the Rashid hotel in central Baghdad which narrowly missed Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, who had been staying there. A US colonel was killed and 18 people wounded in that attack.

The International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) confirmed at its headquarters in Geneva that 12 people were killed, including two of its Iraqi employees. Baghdad ICRC spokeswoman Nada Doumani said she believed the employees were security guards.

Realignment is already here, and well advanced. In 1964, Barry Goldwater cracked the Democratic lock on the South. In 1968 and 1972, Republicans established a permanent advantage in presidential races. In the big bang of realignment, 1994, Republicans took the House and Senate and wiped out Democratic leads in governorships and state legislatures. Now, realignment has reached its entrenchment phase. Republicans are tightening their grip on Washington and erasing their weakness among women and Latinos. The gender gap now exposes Democratic weakness among men. Sure, an economic collapse or political shock could reverse these gains. But that's not likely. . . .

In 1992, Democrats captured 59 percent of state legislative seats (4,344 to 3,031 for Republicans). Ten years later, Republicans won their first majority (3,684 to 3,626) of state legislators since 1952. In 1992, Democrats controlled the legislatures of 25 states to 8 for Republicans, while the others had split control. Today, Republicans rule 21 legislatures to 16 for Democrats. Governors? Republicans had 18 in 1992, Democrats 30. Today, Republicans hold 27 governorships, Democrats 23.

Not to belabor dry numbers, but Republicans have also surged in party identification. Go back to 1982, the year of the first midterm election of Ronald Reagan's presidency. The Harris Poll found Democrats had a 14-point edge (40 to 26 percent) as the party with which voters identified. By 1992, the Democratic edge was 6 points (36 to 30 percent) and last year, President Bush's midterm election, it was 3 points (34 to 31 percent). . . .

All these figures represent "a general creeping mode of realignment, election by election," says Burnham. By gaining governors and state legislators, Republicans are now in the entrenchment phase. "If you control the relevant institutions, you can really do a number on the opposition," [Walter Dean] Burnham says. "You can marginalize them."

Last year, Republicans shattered the mold of midterm elections for a new president, picking up nine House seats. Most of these came from Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, states where Republicans controlled the legislature and governor's office in 2001 and exploited the new census to draw House districts for Republican advantage. In 2002, Republicans completed their takeover of Texas by winning the state house of representatives. This allowed them to gerrymander the U.S. House districts earlier this month to target incumbent white Democrats. Unless the redistricting is overturned in court, Democrats may lose five to seven seats in 2004. "Texas means there's no battle for the House" until after the 2010 census, says Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Democrats may wind up with fewer than 200 seats for the first time since 1946, says Burnham.

Democrats have theorized that the voting patterns of Hispanics, women, and urban professionals were producing what analysts John Judis and Ruy Teixeira called an "emerging Democratic majority." But in 2002 and the recall, the theory faltered. The midterm elections saw the demise of the old gender gap--women voting more Democratic than men--that had endured for over two decades. The intervening event was the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. That "really did change things permanently," says Burnham. In 2002, women, partly out of concern for the security and safety of their families, voted like men. Florida exemplified the change. In 2000, President Bush lost the vote of female professionals in the burgeoning I-4 corridor across central Florida. In 2002, his brother, Republican governor Jeb Bush, won that vote.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 — President Bush declined on Monday to commit the White House to turning over highly classified intelligence reports to the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, despite public threats of a subpoena from the bipartisan panel.

The president said in a brief meeting with reporters that the documents were "very sensitive" and that the White House was still discussing the issue with the panel's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey.

Mr. Bush's remarks and subsequent comments from his press secretary suggested that the White House might ultimately refuse the commission's demand for access to the documents, setting up a possible showdown between the White House and the independent investigators.

Last week, Mr. Kean said for the first time that he was prepared to issue a subpoena and risk a courtroom battle with the White House if the documents were not turned over within weeks.

Officials for the commission say the documents include copies of the so-called Presidential Daily Briefing — the summary prepared each morning by the Central Intelligence Agency for the Oval Office — that Mr. Bush received in the weeks before the attacks. The White House refused to provide the reports to House and Senate investigators last year for their investigation of the attacks, citing executive privilege.

After Mr. Kean's comments on Friday, several prominent lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats, joined in urging the White House to make the documents available to the panel, known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which was created by Congress last year over initial objections by the White House.

President Bush yesterday put the best face on a new surge of violence in Iraq as his top defense aides huddled to discuss additional ways of thwarting the anti-American rebellion there before it becomes more widespread.

The president, speaking after attacks on police stations and a Red Cross facility in Iraq killed at least 35 people, said such attacks should be seen as a sign of progress because they show the desperation of those who oppose the U.S.-led occupation.

"The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," Bush said as he sat in the Oval Office with L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq. He added: "The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become, because they can't stand the thought of a free society." . . .

Bush . . . argued that the recent attacks only demonstrated foes' desperation. It was an amplification of a theme he struck after terrorists attacked the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad on Aug. 19, when he said, "Every sign of progress in Iraq adds to the desperation of the terrorists and the remnants of Saddam's brutal regime."

Democrats reacted with ridicule. Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), a presidential candidate, likened Bush's statement to the "light at the end of the tunnel" claims during the Vietnam War. "Does the president really believe that suicide bombers are willing to strap explosives to their bodies because we're restoring electricity and creating jobs for Iraqis?" Kerry asked in a statement.

Bush got a similar reprimand earlier from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has supported the president on Iraq. "This is the first time that I have seen a parallel to Vietnam, in terms of information that the administration is putting out versus the actual situation on the ground," he told Newsweek. White House press secretary Scott McClellan defended Bush's assertion, saying: "Our military leaders have said that some of these attacks have become more sophisticated, but what you're really seeing is that the more progress we make, the more desperate these killers become." . . .

Experts in public opinion said it would be difficult for Bush to convince Americans that the violence was a byproduct of success. Jeremy Rosner, a Democratic pollster, said the public is "more and more worried as the drumbeat of casualties continues and the administration constantly shifts rationale and tactics." Frank Luntz, who has advised Republicans on use of language, said Bush's upbeat argument is "better than saying nothing, but it's not enough to say it. You've got to show the evidence."

Q Thank you, sir. Mr. President, your policies on the Middle East seem, so far, to have produced pretty meager results as the violence between Israelis and Palestinians --

THE PRESIDENT: Major or meager?

Q Meager.

THE PRESIDENT: Oh, okay.

Q Meager.

THE PRESIDENT: Meager.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - More U.S. soldiers have died in combat in Iraq since May 1, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations, than died during main phase of the war, the U.S. military said on Tuesday.

The death toll is a milestone, graphically illustrating the extended character of a war that many Americans believed was nearly finished after just a few weeks of combat. With a stubborn insurgency that is becoming more sophisticated and deadly in its attacks, it's also a sobering reminder of the distance left to go in Iraq.

The 115th combat death occurred on Monday - 114 died prior to May 1 - during the wave of bombings in the Iraqi capital. . . .

President Bush declared this week's extraordinary bombing attacks in Baghdad - killing at least 35 people and wounding 230, mainly Iraqis, on Monday - as proof that terrorists and other anti-coalition forces are becoming desperate and on the wane.

Yet the facts are that combat deaths have been increasing in numbers, not declining, amid signs that guerrilla fighters are becoming better organized.

In retrospect, the U.S. approach in Iraq suffered from a number of miscalculations, unnecessarily alienating many people. Military planners correctly anticipated that they could defeat Iraq's army with a fraction of the troops it took to oust Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait in 1991, but they underestimated the number it would take to keep order across the country after the war.

Faulty intelligence fed largely by Iraqi exiles led planners to believe that most of the Iraqi army would not fight. Instead, U.S. soldiers and Marines faced some of their strongest resistance in southern Iraq. Hit and run attacks took a toll on supply lines. Tactical intelligence was poor. Most units had no interpreters, and interpreters remain in short supply today.

U.S. troops did little to stop the widespread looting that took place in Baghdad after the city fell in April. While much of the city was ransacked, the only government ministry that U.S. troops moved to secure decisively was the Oil Ministry, reinforcing the popular belief that the invaders were only after Iraqi oil.

"I think this was the biggest mistake the Americans made," said Dr. Zaid Makki, 30, an ear, nose and throat specialist who supplements his $120 a month salary by selling satellite dishes three days a week. "If they had just put one tank in front of every ministry here and stopped people from stealing, even the religious men would still be behind them."

The initial months of the occupation were characterized by inaction and chaos. Electricity was out for weeks. Security was nonexistent. Delivery of other basic services faltered. The first U.S. administrator, retired Gen. Jay Garner, was fired after only a few months.

His replacement, L. Paul Bremer, outlawed Saddam's former Baath Party and formally disbanded the 400,000-strong army, under a policy encouraged by powerful exiles, including Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi.

Amer Hussain Fayad, a political science professor at the University of Baghdad, said that decision was perhaps the coalition's biggest mistake after the war because it put thousands of unemployed and angry men on the street. . . .

U.S. troops once regarded as liberators are now seen as occupiers. While the soldiers have done plenty of good in Iraq - repairing schools and hospitals, fixing water treatment plants and thousands of other small projects - the goodwill they once enjoyed is long gone in many areas, replaced by frustration and disillusionment.

"Before, I thought America was here to liberate us, but now my feelings have changed," said Dr. Talib Abdul Jabar al Sayeed, 62, a British-trained physician whose home was raided by mistake in August. "Now I feel like we have to kick them out. I would never have thought that people who came from America, the land of freedom and democracy and civilization, would do this to me."

Senior coalition officials and U.S. military officers continue to cling to the belief, at least publicly, that the Iraqi resistance is composed primarily of former regime loyalists, foreign terrorists and common criminals. They downplay the involvement of nationalist groups, which appear to be growing especially strong in Sunni areas. And they believe that the U.S. presence still has a majority of support among the public. Polls taken in Iraq in the last few months show a majority of respondents want the United States to stay, even though many distrust U.S. intentions.

President George W. Bush’s staff played more of a role in the “Mission Accomplished” sign that hung on the carrier Abraham Lincoln than the president suggested yesterday in a Rose Garden press conference.

Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq from the Lincoln’s deck on May 1. Since then about 215 American troops have been killed in action and hundreds more wounded.

The president sought to distance himself from the upbeat message in the banner, explaining at Tuesday’s press conference that the idea for the sign came from the ship’s crew.

“I know it was attributed somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff — they weren’t that ingenious, by the way,” he said.

Turns out they may have been that ingenious.

Navy officials and the White House yesterday said that while the crew of the Lincoln came up with the banner’s message, the White House printed it.

“The Navy asked for help in the production of the banner for the president’s visit. So we helped,” said White House spokesman Allen Abney.

The crew felt the banner reflected their recent operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq, according to Navy officials and the White House.

The Navy’s spokesman, Rear Adm. T McCreary, said, “The White House communications office did print it at the ship’s request.”

The White House communications office, well known for the care it takes with the backdrops at Bush speeches, created the “Mission Accomplished” banner in the same style as banners the president uses in other appearances, including one just a week before the carrier appearance in Canton, Ohio. That banner, with the same soft, brush-stroked American flag in the background and the identical typeface, read: “Jobs and Growth.”

DURHAM, N. H. — Presidential candidate Wesley Clark stepped up his criticism of President Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq on Tuesday, seizing on Bush’s contention of having nothing to do with the "Mission Accomplished" banner that hung overhead when the president declared last May that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."

At a news conference Tuesday in Washington, Bush said the "sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln saying that their mission was accomplished."

Clark, observing that the May 1 speech was Bush’s "staged event," said, "I think it’s outrageous he would blame the sailors for that. And that was an event his advance team staged.

"I guess the next thing we’re going to hear is that the sailors told him to wear the flight suit and prance around on the aircraft carrier. "

KIRKUK, Iraq -- When you journey abroad, news from home tends to arrive in disjointed snippets. But rarely has such a tidbit seemed as unrooted in reality as the comment of President Bush that reached here a day after a series of devastating bombings in Baghdad. The attacks, Bush said, resulted from the progress of the occupation and the desperation of the insurgents.

Bush is right that progress is occurring in some places, including this city north of Baghdad. But even here progress is fitful, and dependent on Iraqi confidence that the Americans will not bail out anytime soon. The president's implication that the latest well-coordinated attacks are a last gasp of a desperate opposition seems so much a product of wishful thinking that it can only undermine that confidence, even as it continues to mislead Americans about the difficulty of defeating a ruthless insurgency.

Here's the reality: Insurgents are waging a strategic and malevolently clever campaign that is achieving, in its terms, considerable success. The kind of progress that Bush seeks cannot be accomplished under current conditions of danger and uncertainty. What Iraqis need as they emerge from decades of stifling repression is a richness of contact with the world and a faith that change -- true, structural change -- is possible. Both of those -- the contact and the faith -- are undermined, deliberately and successfully, by terrorism aimed at any vulnerable point of intersection between cooperating Iraqis and well-wishing foreigners.

Saddam Hussein isolated his people in a prison of secret-police-enforced fear. Now fear of terrorism is isolating them in a different way. The charitable, human rights and democracy-building volunteers who should be streaming into the country are for the most part staying away. That further exposes the official occupiers, who in turn are forced to distance themselves from the people they are here to help.

Nothing symbolizes that distance more sadly than the Baghdad presidential palace-turned-occupation headquarters. Inside the vast complex, once-echoing hallways teem with soldiers and civilians dedicated to the noble job of reconstruction. But they work behind so many layers of security -- behind walls and tanks and signs threatening "DEADLY FORCE" and approach roads turned into slaloms of concrete barriers -- that the palace must seem to ordinary Iraqis, if not as frightening as in the past, certainly as remote. When senior occupation officials do venture out, it is often in convoys bristling with armed guards. . . .

There is a danger that slow progress will shift into reverse as Iraqis grow impatient and the insurgency becomes more skilled. The occupiers would have to isolate themselves further, while American clamoring for an "exit strategy" would further erode Iraqi confidence. There is a danger, in other words, of defeat -- one that would be devastating both for the vast majority of Iraqis, who do not want Saddam Hussein's henchmen to return, and for America's safety and well-being.

Major events in the investigation of mutual funds

Sept. 3: New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer launches an investigation into hedge fund Canary Capital Partners and several mutual funds Bank of America's Nations Funds, Bank One Funds, Strong and Janus over suspected trading abuses.

Sept. 12: Research firm Morningstar says it has withdrawn indefinitely any recommendations on Janus mutual funds.

Sept. 30: Alliance Capital says it suspended two executives after finding conflicts of interest related to fund trading.

Oct. 1: A dozen stockbrokers and managers at Prudential are forced to resign after an internal investigation finds evidence of improper mutual fund trading.

Oct. 2: A former trader for Millennium Partners, a $4 billion hedge fund, pleads guilty to securities fraud in the second criminal case to stem from Spitzer's probe.

Oct. 9: The SEC says it will propose new rules to combat market timing and late trading in the mutual fund industry.

Oct. 14: Morgan Stanley, one of Wall Street's top investment banks, says the SEC may take action over its failure to disclose incentives related to mutual fund sales. The bank also says it received a subpoena in July from Spitzer requesting information about possible late trading and market timing in mutual funds.

Oct. 15: Bank One executives Mark Beeson, who ran the One Group mutual funds unit, and John AbuNassar, manager of the bank's institutional asset management group, leave amid an internal probe of improper trading.

Oct. 16: James Connelly, a former vice chairman of Fred Alger Management, pleads guilty to criminal charges of evidence tampering as part of a probe into whether the money manager permitted illegal trading of mutual fund shares.

Oct. 24: Four portfolio managers at Putnam are forced to leave the firm after they profited from market timing their own funds.

Tuesday: Putnam and two former portfolio managers are charged with civil securities fraud by Massachusetts regulators and the SEC related to market timing.

In recent months, in this column and on my website, I’ve been chronicling the outbreak of a new epidemic running rampant at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. I call it “up-is-downism.” The condition is characterized by a persistent propensity to claim that black is white, that up is down, that hot is cold and other similarly improbable sentiments.

Now it seems the malady has spread to Capitol Hill. And Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kans) has an acute case.

Let’s review the symptoms.

We know that our intelligence about what we’d find in Iraq was woefully off the mark. And many of the errors and misjudgments were contained in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which was cobbled together about exactly one year ago.

The question is, who’s to blame?

Many people think that the president, the vice president and the civilians at the Pentagon pushed, prodded and bullied the CIA and the rest of the Intelligence Community until they produced the intel that they wanted to fit their policy. Roberts has a different take altogether: The CIA sold the White House a bill of goods about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

“The executive was ill-served by the intelligence community,” Roberts told The Washington Post. The NIE was sloppily put together, the evidence was overstated and too many unreliable sources were credited. In other words, according to Roberts, the agency bamboozled the White House into thinking there was a lot more WMD than there really was. It led a credulous executive down the garden path. . . .

But that’s not what happened here.

We know that the Bush administration specifically resisted calling for an NIE until very late in the game because it didn’t want the results and findings getting in the way of the policy the administration had already decided on. The reason an NIE was finally pulled together is that Senate Democrats wanted some sense of what the evidence was for all the White House’s claims about Iraqi WMD and ties to international terrorism.

In other words, the NIE was only put together when the policy was being sold, not when it was being put together. So the administration could not have been misled or ill-served by it because it was never used to formulate policy. The administration only used it to sell the policy to a skeptical Congress.

The timing of the NIE points to another important conclusion. If you’re wondering why the document seemed so slanted in favor of alarmist judgments about Iraq’s WMD, it’s probably because it was produced for a White House that already had a policy in place. With the policy already decided upon, it was, shall we say, pretty clear how the White House wanted the report to turn out. And, unfortunately, the agency obliged.

The day after Roberts made his initial remarks about the CIA, he issued a statement claiming that the Post had “mischaracterized” his remarks.

Roberts hadn’t meant to characterize the totality of the agency’s work, said one of his aides, but only particular foul-ups such as the now-discredited Niger uranium story. But that’s hardly any better, since the uranium story is the one in which we know the most about what the CIA was doing to resist the White House’s push. It’s a proof against Roberts’s criticism, not in favor of it.

The simple truth is that Roberts’s spin makes no sense no matter how you slice it. It’s an open secret — heck, it’s not even a secret — that the White House and the CIA battled for 18 months over Iraq intelligence assessments, with the White House consistently pushing more alarmist interpretations and the CIA pushing more cautious ones. Given that, it’s simply impossible to believe that the push for exaggeration (and the desire for it) came from the Agency rather than the White House.

The CIA — particularly the top brass — does have a lot to answer for. But its sin isn’t the one Roberts says it is. After more than a year of bullying and harassment, the CIA largely gave way to White House’s pressure to shape the intelligence to fit the policy. Rather than a check on the White House’s excesses, the agency became an enabler.

Someone at the CIA should be called to account for that failure. But one suspects that’s not a criticism Roberts is prepared to make.

WASHINGTON, Oct 29: As many as 15,000 Iraqis were killed in the first days of America's invasion and occupation of Iraq, a study produced by an independent US thinktank said on Tuesday. Up to 4,300 of the dead were civilian non-combatants.

The report, by Project on Defence Alternatives, a research institute from Cambridge, Massachussets, offers the most comprehensive account so far of how many Iraqis died.

The toll of Iraq's war dead covered by the report is limited to the early stages of the war, from March 19 when American tanks crossed the Kuwaiti border, to April 20, when US troops had consolidated their hold on Baghdad.

Researchers drew on hospital records, official US military statistics, news reports, and survey methodology to arrive at their figures. They were also able to make use of two earlier studies on Iraq's war dead from Iraq Body Count, a website which has kept a running total of those killed, and the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, which has sought to count the dead and injured of the war in order to pursue compensation claims for their families.

The new report, which estimates Iraq's war dead at between 10,800 and 15,100, uses a far more rigorous definition of civilian than the other studies to arrive at a figure of between 3,200 and 4,300 civilian noncombatants. It breaks down the combat deaths of up to 10,800 Iraqis who fought the American invasion. The figures include regular Iraqi troops, as well as members of the Ba'ath party and other militias.

The killing was concentrated - with heavy casualties at the southern entrances of Baghdad - but as many as 80 per cent of the Iraqi army units survived the war relatively unscathed, in part because troops deserted.

As many as 5,726 Iraqis were killed in the US assault on Baghdad, when the streets of the Iraqi capital were strewn with the bodies of people trying to flee the fighting.

As many as 3,531 - more than half - of the dead in the assault on the capital were noncombatant civilians, according to the report. Overall in Iraq, the ratio of civilian to military deaths is almost twice as high as in the last Gulf war in 1991. The overall toll of the first war was far higher - with estimates of 20,000 Iraqi soldiers and 3,500 civilians killed.

However, Operation Iraqi Freedom, as the US military calls this year's war, has proved far deadlier to Iraqi civilians both in absolute numbers, and in the proportion of noncombatant to military deaths.

The findings defy the reasoning that precision-guided weapons spare civilian lives. According to the author of the study, Carol Conetta, 68 per cent of the munitions used in this war were precision-guided, compared with 6.5 per cent in 1991.

We were just listening to your reading of the news where we were hearing you quoting American statesmen as saying that-- talking about the number of foreign fighters in Iraq. Well, I can tell you there are at least 200,000 foreign fighters in Iraq and 146,000 of them are wearing American uniform. You know, Americans in Iraq did not grow up in Tikrit eating dates for breakfast. The largest number of foreign fighters in Iraq, a thousand times over anything Al Qaeda can do, are western soldiers. And we need to realize that we're maintaining an occupation there.

Are there foreign Arab fighters, which is really what your question is about. I think there are probably a few, though we don't know how many and we don't know how many of them actually entered Iraq. Not as friends of Al Qaeda, but in heeding the call of Saddam Hussein to defend Iraq before the American invasion. But, you know, at the end of the day, this is what we call a canard. It's a game. It's a lie. The resistance to the American presence, and these ferocious, brutal, cruel attacks on Iraqis themselves are being carried out largely by Iraqis. The Americans claimed, after the bombings, oh, they managed to get one of the suicide bombers who didn't kill himself and he had a Syrian passport. I noticed we've not been given his passport number or his nationality, date of birth or, indeed, his name. Well, he may be real. He may be real.

But the vast majority of the, quote, resistance, unquote, are Iraqis and my own investigations, particularly around the city of Fallujah, which is where so many Americans have been killed, American servicemen, is that these people were originally Iraqis with a growing interest in the politics of Islam, who, under Saddam Hussein, were permitted, because Saddam knew when to let the top off the kettle and let it not boil over. Were permitted to form an organization called the committee, or the organization, of the faithful. They weren't pro-Saddam; in many cases they, like the people of Fallujah, were arrested and very cruelly treated by Saddam's henchmen. But they were allowed to form individual groups who could discuss religion, providing they didn't talk about politics.

When the regime fell, when the Americans entered Baghdad on the ninth of April this year, these groups became the only focused resistance against American rule. And they did decide, individually and then in coordination, that they would become the Iraqi resistance. I wrote about this actually on April 9. But, these people did begin to believe that they could be the new nationalists, aided, of course, with the weapons of Saddam, the former henchmen of Saddam, and, to some considerable extent, by a population which felt that the American occupiers were behaving brutally.

One man, a tribal leader around Fallujah, whose village I went to and, indeed, I had lunch with him a few weeks ago said to me, you know, originally when the Americans came here, we shouted our greetings to them. But when we staged a protest against their presence, they shot 14 of us dead. There were indeed 14 Iraqis shot dead in Fallujah. After that, he said, it became a question of tribal honor. We had to take our revenge against the Americans, and as they shot back, it became a question of resistance. So, what you found is that the way in which the Americans behave, the way in which the Iraqis behaved, plus this cellular system of groups of the faithful, which were permitted to exist under Saddam, though not with much enthusiasm from the previous regime, turned a war of resistance-- or, rather, turned a war of revenge into a war of resistance. And the people who are killing Americans, at the moment, and killing fellow Iraqis, are largely Iraqis. Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Bush can go on talking till cows come home about foreign fighters. These are not, for the most part, people who were born outside Iraq, which most Americans were. They are people who are called Iraqis. This is a resistance movement, whether we like it or not.

Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are discussing whether to launch an independent investigation of how the White House handled pre-war intelligence on Iraq.

To prepare for such a possible move, they have already obtained from former CIA officials the names of intelligence operatives who would be willing to testify in such an all-Democratic forum behind closed doors.

Sen. John Rockefeller (W.Va.), the ranking Democratic member and vice chairman of the committee, met with fellow Democratic panel members Carl Levin (Mich.) and Dick Durbin (Ill.) last Thursday to review whether to mount a separate investigation in response to what they view as Republican efforts to shield President Bush and the administration from scrutiny over the pre-invasion decision-making process.

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) takes the position that extending the intelligence review into White House decision-making would be an unprecedented and unwarranted expansion of the committee’s traditional jurisdiction. He has told the Democrats on his panel of his stance in no uncertain terms.

But the Democrats insist that the committee’s 1976 organizing resolution grants it jurisdiction over all “the intelligence activities and programs of the U.S. government.”

Roberts said a separate investigation by Democrats would “set a unique and unfortunate precedent for the committee.” But he acknowledged that “our committee rules are such that the vice chairman has unique jurisdiction and authority.”

In addition to launching investigations and issuing subpoenas, the Democratic vice chairman can preside over the committee, hold meetings without the presence of a majority member of the committee and authorize witness interrogation by committee staff.

But even with his unique power as the top Democrat on the committee, Rockefeller has been hesitant to defy Roberts, whom he regards as a friend.

He is also said to be keenly aware of the obstacles to embarking on what Republicans would consider a rogue investigation.

Hill staffers who have followed the growing partisan turmoil on the panel say that Levin and Durbin are the committee members who most strongly favor scrutinizing how top Bush administration officials potentially misused prewar intelligence to justify an invasion of Iraq.

“We talked about this repeatedly because chairman Roberts has refused to let this investigation to get even close to the White House and administration,” said Durbin. “Historically this has never happened, to my knowledge. This has always been a very bipartisan committee and I think Sen. Rockefeller has bent over backwards to try to avoid this kind of partisan[ship.]”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the panel who could not make last week’s meeting of committee Democrats, said that the White House must be scrutinized.

“If that’s true and we can’t get cooperation to look at that then, yes, I strongly feel we should exercise rule six and seven,” she said. She was referring to provisions of the committee’s authorizing resolution.

Rule Six authorizes Roberts or Rockefeller to launch an investigation if five other members of the committee concur. In addition to Rockefeller, there are seven Democrats on the committee — making it nearly certain that Rockefeller would have the necessary support to move forward should he chose to do so.

Rule Seven allows either the chairman or the vice chairman to issue subpoenas “for the attendance of witnesses or the production of memoranda, documents, records or any other material.”

Intelligence committee Democrats note that their panel is the only one in Congress that gives the minority the power to conduct an investigation and issue subpoenas.

As violence has spiraled in Iraq, top U.S. officials have debated pulling intelligence officers off the so-far unsuccessful hunt for weapons of mass destruction and reassigning them to counterinsurgency efforts, officials said today.

The United States already is planning to recruit more Iraqis to gather information about opposition fighters and may increase security measures to protect troops, President Bush said Tuesday, the third straight day of bombings in Iraq.

But Pentagon, CIA and other top officials have not been able to agree on whether to reassign some of the 1,400 people working on the weapons search, three officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said today.

One intelligence official said they have been struggling for more than three weeks over the question of whether shifting intelligence personnel to the battle against insurgent forces would be harmful. Other possibilities include moving the needed intelligence officers, linguists and others from somewhere else, contracting outsiders or options that the official declined to cite.

Some officials have made the case that the No. 1 priority is to stop the attacks on coalition forces, Iraqis and international organizations.

Others are arguing that it's vitally important to find out what happened to biological and chemical weapons that the Bush administration said Saddam Hussein had and which constituted the main rationale for war.

Any move to reduce those working on the weapons hunt would likely have political implications since critics charge the administration exaggerated the weapons charge to justify a war it had already decided to wage, one official said.

"Next year in New York" is already the rallying cry of more than 150 groups planning to protest Bush's coronation. United for Peace and Justice, which organized some of the biggest demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq, has applied for a 250,000-person permit to march past Madison Square Garden, where the convention is being held, on the event's first full day.

Everyone from radical anarchists to moderate environmentalists expects the NYC/GOP ideological collision to spark the biggest American protest march since the end of the Vietnam War. Families of 9/11 victims, predominantly Democratic like the oasis of ideological sanity they live in, are so incensed at reports that the convention was timed to allow Bush to lay the Freedom Tower cornerstone at the World Trade Center site that many plan to join the protest. "Keep your hands off Ground Zero," Rita Lasar, head of a 9/11 victims group, warns Republicans. "Do not make a political football out of this."

Too late. New York's Republican mayor and governor have denied the cornerstone-laying story, but they've confirmed that Bush will shuttle back and forth between the convention in midtown and speeches at Ground Zero. And Rudy Giuliani is encouraging convention organizers to use 9/11 as a prop. . . .

As much as I relish the idea of a million angry Americans turning the tawdry Necropublican National Convention into a Seattle WTO-style fiasco, the potential for mayhem is terrifying. As a Manhattanite, I hope that the Republicans will seriously consider moving their convention somewhere else. New York, wounded by the dot-com crash and 9/11 (the latter injury exacerbated when Bush welched on the money he promised to help the city rebuild), continues to suffer from widespread unemployment. The risk of convention-related terrorist attacks should be reason enough to not hold it in a city that paid the highest price on 9/11. A revival of 1968, with cops fouling their batons with the blood of young people, wouldn't do anyone--left or right--any good.

After yet another bloody day in Iraq, US President George Bush dropped his enthusiastic message that the latest wave of attacks was evidence of just how much "progress" was being made in bringing freedom to the country.

Bush's Democratic opponents had been scathing when he proffered this view on Monday following the death of nearly 40 Iraqis and one American in a wave of suicide bombings that also left about 230 wounded. "If this is progress, I don't know how much progress we can take," Senator Tom Daschle retorted. . . .

"We are at war in Iraq", said Richard Holbrooke, president Bill Clinton's UN ambassador, voicing an opinion that is beginning to reverberate here. "You cannot do nation-building with a country at war." . . .

Six months after the war was said to be over, US military casualties, like civilian casualties, are mounting daily, with 217 US soldiers killed in that time bringing the total since the war began to 355. More than 1730 US soldiers have been wounded.

These numbers will become a serious political liability for Bush as he enters an election year. So, despite all the strong words about not running out of Iraq, some Democrats say they will not be surprised to see Bush declare next year that enough "progress" has been made to start pulling large numbers of US forces out, whatever the consequences.

The United Nations is pulling out its international staff from Baghdad while it re-evaluates the security situation, a spokeswoman for the organization said today.

The move comes after a series of deadly suicide bombings in Iraq earlier this week; in August, a bombing at the United Nation's headquarters in Baghdad killed 22 staff members and visitors and injured more than 150 people.

"We have asked our staff in Baghdad to come out temporarily for consultations with a team from headquarters on the future of our operations, in particular security arrangements that we would need to take to operate in Iraq," the spokeswoman, Marie Okabe, said.

She said it was not an evacuation from Iraq, and that staff would remain in the northern part of the country. . . .

The Associated Press quoted United Nations officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, as saying that about 20 staff members remained in Baghdad and some 40 others across Iraq.

Major donors to George Bush's election campaigns were the main beneficiaries of an $8bn (£4.7bn) bonanza in government contracts for the rebuilding of Iraq, an investigation published yesterday said.

In the most comprehensive survey to date of the postwar financial dispensations for Afghanistan and Iraq, the Centre for Public Integrity tracked more than 70 US firms and contractors involved in reconstruction, exposing their connections to figures in various administrations, Congress and the Pentagon.

The report arrives a day after senators agreed to give $18.4bn for the reconstruction of Iraq in grants, rather than loans, a move seen as a victory for the Bush administration. Mr Bush was in Ohio yesterday trying to raise additional funds for an election warchest that has reached $85m.

According to the centre's report, more than half of the companies - and nearly every one of the top 10 contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq - had close ties to Washington's political establishment or to the Pentagon. Company executives had worked in previous administrations - Democratic as well as Republican - and cultivated privileged connections with their old workplaces.

The study found a clear tilt towards firms with Republican connections - especially among the top 10 list of beneficiaries from the postwar era.

Since 1990, the companies and their employees have donated $49m to national political campaigns. Republican party committees received $12.7m, the report says, compared with $7.1m for the Democrats.

President Bush alone got $500,000, more than any other candidate since 1990. The biggest postwar windfall by far - $2.3bn - went to Kellogg, Brown & Root, or KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the defence contractor under the stewardship of Dick Cheney, until he was chosen by Mr Bush as his running mate.

Connections to the Bush administration helped even with the dispensation of relatively low-profile projects, such as the $38m contract awarded to Science Applications International Corp for development of representative government and free media in Iraq.

The firm was associated until recently with David Kay, the expert leading Washington's hunt for Saddam Hussein's elusive arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Kay left his post as vice-president in October 2002, six months before the war.

WASHINGTON-- President George W. Bush's declaration that no more GIs will be needed in Iraq may go down with his premature declaration of victory on May 1 as one of the worst foot in mouth gaffs of his presidency. For the pattern of guerrilla war that has already taken root in Iraq has historically required vast numbers of occupying troops just to contain, let alone defeat it.

As we noted in UPI Analysis Wednesday, France had to send hundreds of thousands of young conscript soldiers to Algeria throughout an eight-year war to just contain the National Liberation Front there, even though France had previously ruled Algeria for more than 150 years. And while Britain successfully contained the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, at the height of The Troubles there, it required 35,000 troops to contain guerrillas operating out of a minority community of only half a million people.

The Department of Defense strategy against the rapidly escalating guerrilla campaign there is based on gung-ho Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's favorite concept of aggressive response. But this assumes that the resistance is a single, structured and unrepresentative organization, effectively run by old Baathists loyal to toppled former President Saddam Hussein.

In fact, operational military intelligence assembled by the U.S. army's own analysts and those of the British army operating in southern Iraq both point to a very different conclusion: that the resistance is popularly based, widespread, diffuse and was originally very poorly organized, although it has been learning to network, adapt and coordinate at rapid speed.

One development in particular has been left almost entirely un-remarked upon by the army of armchair strategists and pontificators in Washington newsrooms and TV studios, although U.S. soldiers in the field are all too aware of it. That is the rapid speed with which the guerrillas have turned to the use of mortars to bombard static U.S. positions and bases.

As American veterans of Vietnam and anyone who lived through or reported on the Lebanese Civil War or the conflicts in Yugoslavia are well aware, mortars are the artillery of choice for guerrilla and paramilitary forces in inflicting heavy casualties on those who occupy them.

Mortars are easily transportable and very simple to set up, fire and then dismantle. UPI Foreign Editor Claude Salhani, a veteran of covering Middle East wars, notes that a good mortar team can fire about 20 rounds into the air and be on the move before the first round hits its target, alerting the victims to their peril. That is because the muzzle velocity of the mortar is so slow.

The only way to prevent concentrations of occupying troops being decimated by regular mortar bombardments is to have so many rapid-moving, quick response mobile infantry patrols out in the surrounding areas, whether urban or countryside, that mortar teams, slowed down by the weight of their equipment, can be rapidly located and killed. The British Army's Special Air Service specialized in doing that for years against IRA units operating in the "Bandit Country" of South Armagh in Northern Ireland.

Such forces provide vital screening protection and cut down on massive casualties being suffered by the occupying power, but even when they are there, casualties from lots of skilled and determined guerrilla mortar teams can be very serious, as U.S. veterans of Vietnam will testify. It is far worse, however, not to venture out into the city slums of the countryside because not doing so, or having insufficient occupying troops to do so, gives the guerrilla mortars teams a free hand to inflict serious casualties on their targets bunched together in their own bases.