Mr Khalilzad told the Los Angeles Times Iraq had been pulled back from the brink of civil war after the February 22 bombing of a Shia shrine in Samarra. However, another similar incident would leave Iraq "really vulnerable" to that happening, he said. "We have opened the Pandora's box and the question is, what is the way forward?" He added that the best approach was to build bridges between religious and ethnic communities.

An opinion poll published by the Washington Post and ABC News yesterday suggested that most Americans agreed with Mr Khalilzad - with 80% saying civil war in Iraq was likely, and more than a third that it was very likely. More than half thought the US should start withdrawing its troops, although only one in six wanted all troops to be withdrawn immediately.

Hours after Mr Khalilzad made his remarks, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld accused Iran of dispatching elements of its Revolutionary Guard to stir trouble inside Iraq. Mr Rumsfeld said: "They are currently putting people into Iraq to do things that are harmful to the future of Iraq and we know it. And it is something that they, I think, will look back on as having been an error in judgment." Mr Khalilzad's intervention comes in a week when the two top US generals in Iraq, John Abizaid and George Casey, are in Washington talking to the Pentagon and the White House about how many troops they will need to maintain stability in Iraq. With his remarks, Mr Khalilzad may have been lobbying Washington to keep as many American soldiers there as possible. The Bush administration is anxious to reduce the US military presence for political and military reasons.

Mr Rumsfeld said sectarian violence had been exaggerated by the media. When asked how that squared with Mr Khalilzad's view, he replied: "Well, he's there. He's an expert. And he said what he said. I happen to have not read it, but I am not going to try to disagree with it."

Nevertheless, it was clear yesterday that the Pentagon was anxious to limit the impact of Mr Khalilzad's remarks. "If you take it from a year ago to now, month to month, the attacks now are down compared to last year," said General Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

Mr Khalilzad suggested the situation was so dangerous that without a substantial US presence, a civil war could suck in other Arab countries on the side of the Sunnis and Iran on the side of the Shias, creating conditions for a regional conflict and disrupting global oil supplies. "That would make Taliban Afghanistan look like child's play," he said.

Last night Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, stepped up pressure on Iran over its nuclear ambitions. Mr Cheney told a meeting of the Israeli lobby group, Aipac, "We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon." Mr Rumsfeld said there were 132,000 US troops in Iraq. Plans were in place to shrink the presence to about 100,000. Downing Street said yesterday no "strict timetable" had been laid down for British troops to withdraw. A Foreign Office spokesman said: "I do not think we would be quite as gloomy as Pandora's box and civil war." But if there were further big sectarian attacks, things could get very difficult, he said.

Violence continued yesterday, with 16 killed and no sign of a coalition government being formed. Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Iraqi prime minister and compromise candidate of the Shia parties, said he would not be blackmailed into quitting.

A new video has been broadcast showing kidnapped British peace activist Norman Kember, 74, and two Canadian colleagues. The fourth, an American, was not shown. Bruce Kent, a friend of Mr Kember's, said: "My hopes have gone up considerably. I am very pleased that there is a picture of him only a week ago."

"Right now there's a vacuum of authority, and there's a lot of distrust," said Mr Khalilzad. He insisted that the only way forward was to continue efforts to form a government of national unity. In the meantime there was no option but for the US to keep its troops in Iraq.

The alternative was to risk the country falling apart, with rival religious extremists taking over portions of it. This in turn could bring about massive disruptions of energy supplies, as conflict engulfed the region, with Arab states backing the Sunnis and Iran throwing its weight behind the Shi'ites.

Mr Khalilzad's blunt words contrast with the efforts of the Bush administration to soothe anxieties here, and convince an ever more sceptical domestic audience that its policies are working. Only last weekend General Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff was insisting that things were going "very, very well" in Iraq.

But Americans do not seem to agree. According to a new ABC/Washington Post poll, 80 per cent now believe that civil war is likely in Iraq, and almost six out of ten however said the war was not worth fighting. The sole consolation for President Bush is that Democrats are considered equally bereft of solutions to the crisis.

Mr Khalilzad's remarks were doubly striking - both for their source, and for the choice of words. Despite the continuing lack of agreement on a broad-based government, he is widely regarded as the most effective US representative so far in Baghdad, with a much deeper understanding of the country than his predecessors.

The words "Pandora's Box" also raise uncomfortable memories for US policymakers. Before the war King Abdullah of Jordan - perhaps Washington's best friend in the region - used that phrase to counsel in vain against a US attack. So too, in September 2004, did President Jacques Chirac of France, a fierce and still not entirely forgiven critic of the invasion.

Now, they are making it a central goal to weed out ethnic or religious loyalties from the Iraqi forces, particularly in the police, which is controlled at the highest levels by Iranian-backed religious Shiite parties. Militiamen loyal to conservative clerics have flooded the police ranks in Baghdad and the south, and reports of uniformed death squads have risen sharply in the past year.

The U.S. military risks alienating religious Shiite leaders with its efforts, but could win some favor among recalcitrant Sunni Arabs, further drawing them into the political process. It is trying an array of possible solutions, including affirmative action programs for Sunni Arabs in police academies, firing Shiite police commanders who appear to tolerate militias and deploying 200 training teams composed of Americans who had been police officers or military policemen to Iraqi police stations around the country, even in remote and risky locations.

For example, U.S. commanders say they have ensured that a new academy class of 1,200 paramilitary recruits is virtually all Sunni, to shift from Shiite dominance. Recently, U.S. advisers in Baghdad had a Sunni replace a Shiite paramilitary commander who appeared to tolerate Shiite militiamen. The new commander purged the ranks. Now, Shiite officers in that unit no longer openly display stickers of Moktada al-Sadr, the radical cleric, on their guns or cars, the U.S. advisers say.

Several of the initiatives, like the overhauling of the sectarian makeup of some academy classes, have been going on for months but are now being done on a larger scale. Others, such as the deployment of the new police training teams, are just getting started on any significant level.

There is no quick fix, senior military officials acknowledge: Besides resistance from Shiite politicians, cleansing the police forces could take years because sectarian loyalties have become so entrenched and because police officers are rooted in their communities.

The police came under harsh criticism during the violence following the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra on Feb. 22. In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, as mobs led by Shiite militiamen attacked dozens of Sunni mosques and left hundreds dead, many police units stood aside out of confusion or sectarian loyalties, according to Iraqi witnesses. Iraqi security forces asserted their presence only after clerics called for calm.

General George Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Friday that police officers allowed militiamen through checkpoints in eastern Baghdad, where much of the violence occurred.

The Iraqi Army poses less of a problem than the police, because the U.S. military has direct operational control over it and because the Americans took more care in building it up.

The military's efforts to revamp the police are taking place alongside a strong push by the U.S. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, to get Iraqi politicians who are forming the new government to appoint a nonsectarian figure as head of the Interior Ministry, which controls the police.

"When you're forming a government, you can't form it with any kind of sectarian element," said Major General J.D. Thurman, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, charged with controlling Baghdad. "That's got to be put aside, particularly with military forces."

Officials at the most powerful Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or Sciri, which oversees the Interior Ministry, have sharply lashed out at the Americans, arguing that the majority Shiites have the right to control security because Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated government used security forces to abduct, torture and kill Shiites on a mass scale.

"The Shiites were beheaded by the security forces before and we are not ready to be beheaded again," said Hadi al-Amiri, leader of the Badr Organization, Sciri's militia trained in Iran. "We can relinquish any part of the government except for the security forces."

The attempts to erase sectarianism dovetail with a broader U.S. initiative to strengthen police training by diverting more resources from mentoring the Iraqi Army. The military hopes to have 200,000 Iraqi police officers in place by early next year. The development of the police is in some ways more crucial than that of the army, because the Americans want the police to handle all security inside Iraq.

The units believed to be most plagued by militia recruitment and sectarian loyalties are the police paramilitary forces, which have a total of 17,500 fighters, the U.S. military says. The regular blue-uniformed police force numbers 89,000. But there are serious doubts about whether anyone has an accurate overall tally.

The paramilitary forces are divided three ways: the commandos, the public- order brigades and a mechanized brigade that will soon be shifted to the army.

The Interior Ministry is accused of sponsoring death squads in police or paramilitary uniforms. Khalilzad has been outspoken in his criticism of the interior minister, Bayan Jabr, and hinted last month that the Americans may withhold financing if sectarianism continues to dominate the security forces.

U.S. commanders say recent scrutiny of the public-order brigades, which were expanded after Sciri took control of the Interior Ministry in early 2005 and whose 7,700 members do light infantry duty, showed that virtually all the members were Shiites.

"When we stood them up, we didn't ask, 'Are you Sunni or are you Shia?'" Major General Joseph Peterson, the U.S. officer overseeing police training, said in an interview at a base in Taji, as he was visiting incoming soldiers assigned to advise the Iraqi police. "They ended up being 99 percent Shia. Now, when we look at that, we say, 'They do not reflect the population of Iraq.'"

No accurate census of Iraq exists, but the country is believed to be about 60 percent Shiite Arab, 20 percent Sunni Arab and 20 percent Kurdish (most Kurds are Sunni). The Americans have pushed the Interior Ministry to diversify the forces. All recruits in the public- order brigades have to go through a six- or seven-week training course, with 1,200 in each class. The Americans ensured that the last three classes enrolled greater numbers of Sunni Arabs: The first of those was 42 percent Sunni Arab, the second 92 percent Sunni and the third, which is just starting, is virtually all Sunni, Peterson said.

U.S. officers say that when they try to talk to Iraqi commanders about the religious or ethnic breakdown of the forces, the commanders tend to shy away from those conversations, as most Iraqis do, saying they prefer to think of themselves as one people rather than in terms of sect.

Colonel Gordon Davis, the top adviser to the public order brigades, said the senior commander of that force, a Shiite Arab from the old Iraqi Army, addresses the issue only with much reluctance. "'You shouldn't be talking like this,' he tells us," the colonel said in an interview at the Iraqi command base in Kadhimiya, a Baghdad neighborhood.

Davis said his advisers have no qualms about removing Iraqi commanders if it becomes evident they have sectarian loyalties.

For much of last year, the 2nd Public Order Brigade had a particularly bad reputation. It was accused by many Iraqis, especially Sunni Arabs, of torture and illegal killings. Its ranks were filled with men recruited from eastern Baghdad who were loyal to Sadr, the firebrand Shiite cleric who has led two rebellions against the Americans.

The head of the brigade was the former police chief of Nasiriya, a southern city under the sway of hard-line Shiite parties, and was "rumored to tolerate" militias, Davis said. The Americans replaced him with a Sunni Arab commander in December, who then fired 160 people below him, presumably because he suspected those men of ties to militias, the colonel said.

Davis said that having the Sunni Arab in charge proved helpful during the militia-driven violence the day of the shrine bombing. The brigade was dispatched to guard Sunni mosques around Baghdad. While the Sunni commander spoke to Sunni imams to calm them, his Shiite officers tried to placate the raging Shiite mobs.

Matthew Sherman, a former Interior Ministry adviser, though, said the commandos also have significant numbers of Shiites loyal to Sciri. Major General Adnan Thabit, a Sunni Arab, is head of the commandos in name only, he said, having ceded control to Shiite partisans. "They've just taken a more kind of political bent over the past 10 months or so," Sherman said.

David S. Cloud contributed reporting from Washington.

Desertion records are kept by fiscal year, so there are no figures from the beginning of the war in March 2003 until that fall.

Some lawyers who represent deserters say the war in Iraq is driving more soldiers to question their service and that the Pentagon is cracking down on deserters.

"The last thing they want is for people to think ... that this is like Vietnam," says Tod Ensign, head of Citizen Soldier, an anti-war group that offers legal aid to deserters. (Related story: Marines hunt Vietnam-era deserters)

Desertion numbers have dropped since 9/11. The Army, Navy and Air Force reported 7,978 desertions in 2001, compared with 3,456 in 2005. The Marine Corps showed 1,603 Marines in desertion status in 2001. That had declined by 148 in 2005.

The desertion rate was much higher during the Vietnam era. The Army saw a high of 33,094 deserters in 1971 - 3.4% of the Army force. But there was a draft and the active-duty force was 2.7 million.

Desertions in 2005 represent 0.24% of the 1.4 million U.S. forces.

Opposition to the war prompts a small fraction of desertions, says Army spokeswoman Maj. Elizabeth Robbins. "People always desert, and most do it because they don't adapt well to the military," she says. The vast majority of desertions happen inside the USA, Robbins says. There is only one known case of desertion in Iraq.

Most deserters return within months, without coercion. Commander Randy Lescault, spokesman for the Naval Personnel Command, says that between 2001 and 2005, 58% of Navy deserters walked back in. Of the rest, the most are apprehended during traffic stops. Penalties range from other-than-honorable discharges to death for desertion during wartime. Few are court-martialed.

Reporter Hedges and producer Buchanan found Ghurairy to be very convincing, worried for his life and very insistent that his face couldn't be shown on camera. He was accompanied by a well-organized entourage.

A story appeared a couple of days later on the front page of the Times and then "Frontline" followed with a report on public television. The stories generated numerous editorials and op-ed pieces and, of course, became the topic of the week on cable talk shows.

Now, the liberal investigative magazine Mother Jones has exposed the "general" as a fake.

"The story of Saddam training foreign fighters to hijack airplanes was instrumental in building the case to invade Iraq," a detailed report in the March-April issue says. "But it turns out that the Iraqi general who told the story to the New York Times and 'Frontline' was a complete fake a low-ranking former soldier whom Ahmed Chalabi's aides had coached to deceive the media."

The Mother Jones investigator, Jack Fairweather, was even able to track down a Lt. Gen. Ghurairy in Iraq. He interviewed him in Fallujah and this Ghurairy said he had never left Iraq, nor had he ever spoken to the U.S. journalists.

According to the magazine, the Ghurairy tale was one of 108 stories the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi, who was exiled from Iraq, planted in the American and British media between October 2001 and May 2002. Chalabi is the figure on whom the Bush administration relied for much of the Iraqi intelligence about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's supposed connection with the 9/11 terrorists.

After the war started, the Bush neocons had a falling out with Chalabi, discovering that much of the information he had provided was fabricated. They also accused him of spying on the U.S. for neighboring Iran. He has had a resurgence in Iraq, though, and is now the deputy prime minister in the new U.S.-sponsored government and apparently back in favor with the Bush people.

He obviously had a major role in helping sell the war to the American people. Thanks to the deceptions, which a compliant American press didn't uncover, some 69 percent of the American public believed that Saddam had a role in the 9/11 attacks.

Just how hookwinked Americans were is underscored by this Mother Jones expose.

Dave Zweifel is editor of The Capital Times. E-mail: dzweifel@madison.com

Only this ending has a slight twist. Soldier, we are told, can't wait to get his prosthetic legs so that he can go jogging with our divine president Bush. Ahh yes, who ever thought that life could be so cheery as a result of losing one's limbs?

As I listened to this feature, on Communist Network News, I couldn't believe the carefree and upbeat nature of this presentation. Accordingly, this is perhaps the worst, most devious, most offensive kind of war propaganda: that no matter how calamitous the consequences of a murderous war, we must look on the "bright side" via the unfurling of sprightly animations. Please, dear media, do give us another gleeful feature story that reminds us how meritorious all the killing and limb shedding really is.

The story – as I listened to it over my satellite radio – came upon me like an ad blitz, and in a moment of coincidence, too. I had just popped on my XM receiver, in a parking lot, after having left a hospital in downtown Detroit. The two hours spent there were to guide my brother toward the Mother of All Decisions: to endure yet another dangerous, tormenting surgery (with less than a 30% chance of success) to save the leg, or, bring on the inevitable amputation. Somehow, that moment did not take on the attributes of a breezy, Disney-like feature story as do the innumerable instances of war mutilations. Thus I consider my brother to be an absentee from the "Amputees for Bush" club.

Yes, I shall regain my senses and come to Believe. Oh to be twenty-something, and looking forward to prosthetics made necessary by the pursuit of a democratic cause in the role of cannon fodder! After all, Hiroshima and Nagasaki "ended the war," and thus made us all very safe and happy. Those damn Japanese, like the damn Ay-rabs, are so damn immaterial anyway.

The State has perpetually enabled its concubine media to pump up the propaganda well for the furtherance of its own cause célèbre, and why not? The general masses – otherwise engaged in nighttime sitcom snigger, video things-go-boom, and unremitting mall-hopping – have provided a fertile ground for sowing the seeds of a cerebral takeover by the US Politburo.

Propaganda is, and always has been, a tool of totalitarian regimes. The ultimate goal of propaganda is the mindless obedience of human herds through the acceptance of State values, and thus affirmation of the Politburo ideology. Nazi killer Joseph Goebbels called State propaganda "background music to government policy." Goebbels, at Nuremberg in 1934, uttered the following:

Each situation brings new challenges. And each task requires the support of the people, which can only be gained by untiring propaganda that brings the broad masses knowledge and clarity. No area of public life can do without it. It is the never resting force behind public opinion. It must maintain an unbroken relationship between leadership and people. Every means of technology must be put in its service; the goal is to form the mass will and to give it meaning, purpose, and goals that will enable us to learn from past failures and mistakes and ensure that the lead National Socialist strength has given us over other nations will never again be lost.

May the bright flame of our enthusiasm never fade. It alone gives light and warmth to the creative art of modern political propaganda. Its roots are in the people. The movement gives it direction and drive. The state can only provide it with the new, wide-ranging technical means. Only a living relationship between people, movement, and state can guarantee that the creative art of propaganda, of which we have made ourselves the world's master, will never sink into bureaucracy and bureaucratic narrow-mindedness.

Creative people made propaganda and put it in the service of our movement. We must have creative people who can use the means of the state in its service.

While the media is at times "creative," more accurately, the soldiers of agitprop are sales agents for demagogy and herders of mice. The mice that make up the masses oftentimes lack the traits of self-examination and adequate literacy. Thus the catchpenny phrases, 15-second sound bites, and 2-minute highlights are carefully crafted in order to move the masses, at once, toward a chosen frame of reference. Accordingly, dissonance emerges, and all the little mice accommodate popular credo in order to reduce and mobilize conflict. It all seems so darn easy.

Ancient civilizations, such as Rome and the city-states of Greece, encouraged persuasion through learned debate and argumentation. Plato, Aristotle, the Sophists, and Cicero certainly differed in terms of their thoughts on the usefulness and role of persuasion. However, decision by persuasion, in those times, was of a different sort: more often than not it involved the rigorous use of enlightened techniques as opposed to shoddy sloganeering to fulfill instant psychological needs.

Modern media pop psychology has emerged as a herding technique of men over mice. The propaganda of soft-and-fuzzy war mutilation stories is a means to an end, the end of which is the stiffening of resolve in the face of an unjust and immoral war. Hence do the atrocities of war receive a warm spin. Those in the public hear these stories and they come to believe that if the soldier himself can find purpose in death or devastation, then they too must give in to popular song, and oblige the media masters in their quest for obedience to Leviathan.

Like the Creel Commission forcing German-Americans to kiss American flags, so does the State administrate and regulate every aspect of media – from airwaves to profanity to advertising – and thus force its minions into compliance, and eventually, loyalty. This routine kissing of the flag insures that the vanguard of the people – the Politburo – never goes without its fox in the peoples' henhouse.

And so it goes. If propaganda is background music to government policy, then war has the composer shedding traditional tonal harmony to play the banjo behind the barn at the square dance. And the mice are indeed dancing.

US ambassador in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad met Tuesday with the Shiite clerical leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim to discuss ways of defusing the current crisis.

Al-Hayat reports [Ar.] that leaders of the Sadr Movement met with President Jalal Talabani and other Kurdish leaders in an attempt to resolve the current crisis over the formation of a new government. Fadil al-Shara` suggested that the Kurds accept Ibrahim Jaafari as prime minister "as long as he is monitored by parliament and by the Sadr bloc."

Faraj al-Haydari of the Kurdistan Democratic Party said that the Kurdistan
Alliance position, that Jaafari must go, has not changed.

ABC News quotes retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, a former military commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina, on how Iraq is already in a low-intensity civil war, and how Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's continued state of denial about this is putting the US in danger:

' "We're in a civil war now; it's just that not everybody's joined in," said retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, a former military commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina. "The failure to understand that the civil war is already taking place, just not necessarily at the maximum level, means that our counter measures are inadequate and therefore dangerous to our long-term interest.

"It's our failure to understand reality that has caused us to be late throughout this experience of the last three years in Iraq," added Nash, who is an ABC News consultant.

Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told ABC News, "If you talk to U.S. intelligence officers and military people privately, they'd say we've been involved in low level civil war with very slowly increasing intensity since the transfer of power in June 2004."

Ayhan Simsek surveys the whole range of Turkey's concerns in Iraq. They not only include worries that Kurdistan might become independent and draw in Turkish Kurds but also fear of Iranian political Islam having an impact on Turkey itself. Turks who hold this view see Iraq as a buffer between Iran and Iraq, and fear that the buffer is breaking down.

Kofi Annan says that two things are keeping back an expansion of UN activities in Iraq: no nation will transport UN workers inside Iraq by plane, and the general violence that plagues the country. All I can say is that this is pretty pitiful.

A security patrol reportedly found the abandoned bus on the road between the Amiriyah and Khadra districts.

The men were found bound and blindfolded, officials said.

Iraq has suffered a rise in sectarian attacks since the bombing of a key Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February but it is not known if this was the cause.

However, the dumping of bodies apparently executed has previously been a sign of the violence between minority Sunni Arab and majority Shia groups.

Amiriyah is a troubled suburb in west Baghdad mainly populated by Sunni Arabs.

Civil war fears

Police said the bodies had no identification papers on them. But some reports said two of the men looked like foreign Arabs.

Sources at Yarmouk Hospital told the Associated Press news agency the deaths appeared recent and that two of the victims had been shot while the others were strangled.

The men were dressed in civilian clothes and ranged from young to middle-aged.

In other violence on Wednesday:

* Two policemen are killed and five people hurt in a roadside bombing in central Baghdad

* Another roadside bomb targets a convoy of Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr in central Baghdad, killing two people, police and ministry sources say. The minister is not present

* At least two people are killed in a car bomb attack in the western town of Falluja, police say

* The US military says one of its soldiers was killed and four others wounded on Tuesday by a roadside bomb as their patrol passed in Tal Afar, north-west of Mosul.

The bombing of the shrine at Samarra and subsequent reprisals, in which more than 400 people have died, have sparked fears of civil war.

US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad said on Tuesday the country remained vulnerable to insurgents' attempts to exploit the political uncertainty caused by the bombing.

"There is a concerted effort to provoke civil war," he said.

Mr Khalilzad told the Los Angeles Times the US-led invasion in 2003 had opened "the Pandora's box" of tensions in Iraq.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he did not believe a civil war was going on in Iraq, although admitted that such danger remained.

Iraq's parliament is set to sit on Sunday for the first time since the December elections.

But wrangling between Shia, Sunni Arab and Kurdish parties, particularly over the choice by the Shia-led bloc of Ibrahim Jaafari as prime minister, has cast doubt on the formation of any government of national unity.