The U.S. military released to the media photographs of troop-carrying Black Hawk helicopters lined up in a row for the offensive. There were no pictures of warplanes.

A defense official at the Pentagon, who asked not to be named said it was a relatively large, but sought to downplay the scale of the operation. "It's not precision bombs and things like that," the official said.

Another official said it was "predominantly" a helicopter operation that involved UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and other aircraft and the insertion of ground forces.

A military statement said "Operation Swarmer" involved more than 1,500 Iraqi and U.S. troops and 200 armored vehicles targeting insurgents active near Samarra, 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad.

A defense official in Washington said 600-700 of the troops involved were Iraqi government forces. The rest were Americans.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said the offensive showed Iraqi forces, some facing accusations of cooperating with the rebels, are increasingly capable of securing the country.

PREVIOUS ASSAULTS

The U.S. military has launched several major offensives against Sunni Arab insurgents since the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, including one involving several thousand soldiers that captured the former rebel stronghold of Falluja.

There were also a series of assaults in the rebel heartland in western Iraq's Anbar province which failed to hurt the insurgency and infuriated Iraqis who dug their loved ones out of the rubble after U.S. air strikes.

The U.S. military acknowledged the raid and said it caught one insurgent. It took place near Balad, about 50 miles north of the capital. But the military said only four people were killed - a man, two women and a child.

Political leaders, meanwhile, remained deadlocked on the composition of a new government on the eve of parliament's first session since the Dec. 15 elections. At 8 p.m., a driving ban came into effect in the capital that will last until 4 p.m. Thursday, which has been declared a public holiday.

Authorities in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, 50 miles south of Baghdad, imposed their own six-day driving ban to protect pilgrims from a wave of sectarian killing.

The U.S. command announced the deployment of a battalion of at least 700 soldiers to Iraq from their base in Kuwait to provide extra security in the coming days for the pilgrimages connected to the holiday of Ashura and the convening of parliament. Tens of thousands converge for the religious commemorations, which drew increased attacks in 2004 and 2005.

Monday marks the end of the 40-day mourning period after the death of Imam Hussein in A.D. 680, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. The day also marks the third anniversary of the U.S. invasion.

The decision to add the armored unit, perhaps for as little as 30 days, is in contrast to the Bush administration's hopes to substantially draw down the U.S. military presence in Iraq. There are about 133,000 troops here.

Police Capt. Laith Mohammed, in nearby Samarra, said American warplanes and armor flattened the house and killed the 11 people inside.

An AP reporter in the area said the roof collapsed. Eleven bodies, wrapped in blankets, were taken to the Tikrit General Hospital, relatives said.

Associated Press photographs showed the bodies of two men, five children and four other covered figures at the hospital accompanied by grieving relatives. The victims were covered in dust and bits of rubble.

Riyadh Majid, who said he was the nephew of the killed head of the family - Faez Khalaf - told AP that U.S. forces landed in helicopters and raided the home. Khalaf's brother, Ahmed, said nine dead were residents of the house and two were visitors.

"The killed family was not part of the resistance, they were women and children," Ahmed Khalaf said. "The Americans have promised us a better life, but we get only death."

The U.S. military said it was targeting and captured an individual suspected of supporting foreign fighters for the al-Qaida in Iraq terrorist network.

"Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building," said Tech. Sgt. Stacy Simon. "Coalition forces returned fire utilizing both air and ground assets."

Bombs killed four more people and injured dozens Wednesday.

Three explosions hit Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. A suicide bomber on a bicycle missed a police patrol, killing two civilians and injuring six others, police said.

Later, an explosion in a cell phone shop killed two more people and injured 12, while another bomb targeting a police patrol injured two officers, police said.

A car bomb targeting a police patrol exploded in western Baghdad, killing at least one person and injuring 15, said police Lt. Thaer Mahmoud.

Late Tuesday, a roadside bomb exploded as an official with the Shiite Badr group, drove through Tuz Khormato, 130 miles north of Baghdad, killing the official's son and injuring nine other people, said police Brig. Sarhad Qadir. The Badr group is linked to a Shiite militia accused of widespread abuses by Sunni Muslims.

The deaths of 87 men were blamed on deepening sectarian violence in recent days - most of them shot to death execution-style. Their timing linked much of the bloodshed to revenge slayings for a bomb and mortar attack in a Baghdad Shiite slum that killed 58 and wounded more than 200 on Sunday.

On Tuesday, the U.S. command reported two more soldiers died in fighting in Anbar province, raising the death toll of U.S. military members killed since the start of the war in March 2003 to 2,310, according to an AP count.

Iraqi puppet security sources said that a patrol of Iraqi puppet police arrested three individuals who were planting an explosive device near the headquarters of the so-called Islamic Party. After an investigation of the men it was determined that they were British troops disguised in Arab dress. The source added, "British forces then arrested that Iraqi group that had the three Britons with them. The British troops released their own men but kept the Iraqi puppet police patrol in British custody," Quds Press reported.

The incident brought to mind a similar event that also took place in al-Basrah on an earlier occasion when a number of British troops disguised as Iraqis were caught by local puppet police on 19 September 2005 while trying to plant a bomb at a Shi'i shrine in the city.

Such attacks, and others where the perpetrators are unknown but the targets are civilian Sunni or Shi'i Iraqis, are widely viewed as a part of an Anglo-American effort to rescue their failing fortunes in Iraq by sparking a sectarian civil war in the country enabling them to fulfill their plans of partitioning the Iraq along ethnic and religious lines.

The head of the committee that drafted the country's new constitution, Humam Hammoudi, then stood up and protested two words had been changed in the oath. After brief consultations, judicial officials agreed the wording was acceptable and the session adjourned until further notice.

Adnan Pachachi, the senior politician who administered the oath, spoke of a country in crisis.

"We have to prove to the world that a civil war is not and will not take place among our people," Pachachi told lawmakers. "The danger is still looming and the enemies are ready for us because they do not like to see a united, strong, stable Iraq."

As Pachachi spoke, he was interrupted from the floor by senior Shiite leader Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, who said the remarks were inappropriate, to which he responded, "These are the duties of the Council" of Deputies - parliament's official name.

Afterward acting Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari told reporters that "if politicians work seriously, we can have a government within a month."

Political logjam over al-Jaafari

Al-Jaafari's candidacy for a second term as prime minister is at the center of the political logjam that delayed parliament's first session for over a month after the results of Dec. 15 elections were approved.

Under the constitution, the largest parliamentary bloc, controlled by Shiites, has the right to nominate the prime minister. Al-Jaafari won the Shiite nomination by a single vote last month.

Politicians involved in the negotiations have said part of the Shiite bloc, those aligned with al-Hakim, would like to see al-Jaafari ousted but fear the consequences, given his backing from radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and al-Sadr's powerful Mahdi Army.

Sunni, Kurdish and some secular Shiites argue al-Jaafari is too divisive and accuse him of not doing enough to contain waves of revenge killing after bombers destroyed an important Shiite shrine on Feb. 22 and ripped apart teeming markets in an al-Sadr stronghold in Baghdad on Sunday.

Police reported the discovery of 27 more bodies discarded in various parts of the Baghdad overnight and Thursday morning. The victims were all men, some with their hands bound, who had been shot execution-style and dumped in both Shiite and Sunni Muslim neighborhoods, said Interior Ministry official Lt. Col. Falah al-Mohammedawi.

A pianist played as representatives of the countries main ethnic and religious blocs - many in traditional Arab and Kurdish dress - filed into a convention center behind the concrete blast walls of the heavily fortified Green Zone for parliament's first meeting.

The inaugural session started the clock on a 60-day period in which parliament must elect a president and approve a prime minister and Cabinet.

But there was little sign of progress after a second full day of meetings Wednesday among leaders of the major political blocs. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad brokered the sessions, designed to speed agreement on the next government's shape.

"I expect that there still will be difficulties over choosing the prime minister," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish politician who was in Wednesday's session.

Khalilzad has been pressing political leaders to reach agreement on a national unity government, under which the country's majority Shiite Muslims would share Cabinet posts equitably with minority Sunnis and Kurds.

The Americans see that as the best way to blunt the Sunni-driven insurgency that has ravaged the country since 2003. If a strong central government were in place, Washington had hoped to start removing some troops.

The parliamentary session comes as the U.S. military braces for violence ahead of the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq on March 20,2003, which coincides with a major religious commemoration that came under attack in the two previous years.

The military dispatched a battalion of soldiers from the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division - about 700 troops - to Iraq from its base in Kuwait to provide extra security as tens of thousands of pilgrims converged on Shiite holy cities.

Authorities in one of the cities, Karbala, imposed a six-day driving ban starting Thursday in a bid to protect pilgrims this year. [...]

If we don't know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. But if we know some history, if we know how many times presidents have lied to us, we will not be fooled again.

President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn't that Mexico "shed American blood upon the American soil" but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that he really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to "civilize" the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

President Wilson lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to "make the world safe for democracy," when it was really a war to make the world safe for the rising American power.

President Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was "a military target."

And everyone lied about Vietnam - President Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, President Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin and President Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia. They all claimed the war was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanted to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.

President Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.

The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country. And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991 - hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait, rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.

There is an even bigger lie: the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

If our starting point for evaluating the world around us is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then we are not likely to question the president when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values - democracy, liberty, and let's not forget free enterprise - to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.

But we must face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.

We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which the U.S. government drove millions of Indians off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations.

We must face our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation and racism.

And we must face the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It is not a history of which we can be proud.

Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted the belief in the minds of many people that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. Both the Republican and Democratic Parties have embraced this notion.

But what is the idea of our moral superiority based on?

A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world.

It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join people around the world in the common cause of peace and justice.

The discussion centered on two deeply polarizing questions. Given the extreme danger of the situation in Iraq, are journalists in Iraq even able to cover the real story? And are they getting the story "right"? Responding to moderator Orville Schell, dean of Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and just back from a trip to Iraq, the four participants offered rather different perspectives on both questions. Meanwhile, two reporters who were not present cast long shadows over the journalistic exchange: the constant deadly threat faced by reporters was symbolized by Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor freelancer kidnapped in Baghdad in January and still missing, while the damage to journalistic reputations and credibility was embodied by controversial former New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

Straight from the fog of war

The segment of "The War Tapes" proved the perfect introduction to the evening's topic. According to forum participant John Burns, the New York Times' Baghdad bureau chief and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, this is "the single best document you could see. It captures, in ways we as embedded reporters could not, the misery and futility of this war."

Directed by Deborah Scranton via Internet uploads and instant-messaging, the film will be released to theaters in July; its producers are those behind "The Fog of War," the Errol Morris documentary about Robert McNamara. To create the film, five soldiers volunteered to bring small digital cameras with them on deployment, often mounting the cameras inside their HumVees and on tanks as they patrolled. (One of them was New Hampshire National Guard Sergeant Steve Pink, who joined Scranton to address last night's audience briefly.) The edited result of more than 100 hours of footage is a never-before-seen account of war from the warriors' perspective: at times terrifying, ribald, tedious, and heart-wrenching.

Training in cold New Hampshire before being deployed, troops in camouflage uniforms make angels in the snow as the cameraman giggles and jokes that of course "we're ready for the desert." Later, when mortars land at Baghdad's Camp Anaconda a little too close for comfort, both the camera and the soldier-narrator's voice shake from adrenaline as he tells how Anaconda is the most heavily attacked base in Iraq. An Iraqi selling a pornographic pin-up of a woman is asked if he has any "with farm animals." A Lebanese-born, Arabic-speaking National Guardsman, one of the cameramen, chats easily with the young boys who gather around the soldiers whenever they are out of their vehicles. The interview of that soldier's mother at home in the United States, and her tearful incomprehension of how she could have gotten her son out of a civil war zone to emigrate, only to have him volunteer to go fight in another such war, is one of the segment's most memorable.

The film's footage of the immediate aftermath of a car bomb near a checkpoint is visceral. Such bombs are a daily hazard in Iraq and dutifully noted in U.S. newspapers, but few Americans have seen the gruesome reality as revealed in "War Tapes." The camera pans slowly over the blackened shell of the vehicle and the charred upper torso of a man, head burned beyond recognition, lying halfway outside the open car door in a pool of blood. In numb tones, the soldier holding the camera tells us what that blood and flesh smells like and describes how crisped skin fragments are crunching under his feet.

A ticket to the adrenaline roller coaster

Watching the film gave the Berkeley audience the tiniest taste of what it feels like to be in Iraq right now: hearts taking off like jackrabbits when artillery fire suddenly pings the windshield right in front of you, stomachs turning at the sight of the remnants of violent death. And yet, "when you travel with the U.S. military you only get one part of the story," reminded participant Anna Badkhen, a Chronicle staff writer who has reported from wartime Chechnya, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and Iraq. "You can't say on a raid, 'Excuse me, I'm just going to talk to this person, can you wait 10 minutes' … We never find out what the Iraqis are feeling."

Jackie Spinner, Washington Post staff writer and author of "Tell Them I Didn't Cry," an account of a year spent in Baghdad starting in May 2004, disagreed that reporters in Iraq are prevented from telling both sides. "I think we're getting 90 percent of the story," she said. When disbelieving guffaws rang out from the audience, she retorted, "Excuse me, have you been there?" She went on to explain how when Washington Post reporters can't go out, "we rely on this whole cadre of Iraqi stringers and translators, who in the case of the Washington Post are Post-trained journalists."

Those skeptical of this reliance should take the time to read Spinner's book, which describes in detail the tight bond between the Post's Baghdad correspondents and the Iraqis who risk their lives to work for the bureau, often keeping their jobs a secret even from family members lest the insurgents kill them in retaliation. Before the situation in Iraq turned even more dangerous, Spinner - a UC Berkeley journalism alumna - would dress in a headscarf and full-length abaya and ride to the scene of an incident. There she would wait while her translator brought her an Iraqi who she could interview inside the tinted windows of the car. Later, she could not always go herself, but would be in constant contact with the Iraqi staff, guiding what questions they asked and pressing for details of the source's mannerisms, hesitations, and context.

And yet, "it's never quite the same as going yourself," admitted Burns. He invoked the Carroll kidnapping and reminded the audience that almost 70 journalists, the majority of them Iraqi, have already been killed in these three years of the Iraq war - roughly the same number as died during the decade-plus duration of the Vietnam War. (Three Iraqi journalists were shot dead just in the past seven days.) Explaining the bind he is in as bureau chief, deciding whether getting a particular story is worth the risk to his staff, he asked, "Am I going to commit my colleagues or myself into a situation which can very easily turn catastrophic for us? My pledge to my editors is that everyone who goes comes home safe, although it's more a prayer than an expectation at this point."

Mark Danner, a professor at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, was the most pessimistic of the group, although he tried to couch his disagreement respectfully. "I think it's important to distinguish between good journalism, which is being done there, and conditions that are overwhelmingly difficult," said Danner, who has made three trips to Iraq and is the author of 2004's "Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror" and "The Iraq War: The Secret Way to War," forthcoming this year.

"The story we're getting is very limited because the risks are so great," Danner concluded. "[The violence] has to have an effect, it has had an effect, and I think we should recognize that."

When no news is good-enough news

Whether journalists are getting even that limited story right depends on what "right" means to the reader. Most soldiers, including those who made "The War Tapes," and conservatives believe that the media focuses on the war's negative aspects, to the exclusion of all the good works being done in Iraq. When Schell, Burns, and Spinner were interviewed on KQED's Forum program the morning of the Berkeley talk, one caller to the program excoriated the media for failing to report sooner on the torture and degradation by U.S. soldiers of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, which he claimed were known about for a year beforehand.

Spinner defended her coverage, even in the face of e-mails like one she recalled receiving that told her she should have died that day in Fallujah, instead of the marine whose death she reported. "The Iraq war has so polarized this country. That's why you hear hisses and boos and claps, depending on what you're saying - people want to hear journalists reaffirm their previously held beliefs about the war," Spinner said. "And I don't do that. I simply speak what I see. And I'm sorry if that's offensive to people, but I'm a journalist."

Not just a journalist but an "old-school journalist," she clarified in response to Schell's first question about the evolutions of the panelists' views of the war. "I went to Iraq not because I was for or against it, but because there was a war," Spinner said, adding she believes it is inappropriate for journalists to take sides publicly, as they are supposed to write from a neutral stance.

The others were not so circumspect. "I've covered so many conflicts, and seen so many unnecessary deaths, and I thought this war could have been avoided," Badkhen answered Schell. Danner's quip that "I thought it was a terrible idea at the beginning, and then I really turned against it," got a big laugh and a round of applause, but he had the home-team advantage: many in the audience had likely attended his pre-invasion debate in January 2003 with hawkish journalist Christopher Hitchens over whether war with Iraq would make America safer.

Meanwhile Burns, who began reporting from Iraq long before the U.S.-led invasion, said that he had at first believed that Iraqis would be better off if the violent tyrant Saddam Hussein were toppled. He had been "mesmerized by Saddam Hussein's brutality into looking through a narrow glass," he admitted, and had "missed the fractured society beneath the tyranny," a society that is now looking as if it is about to degenerate into a bloody, decades-long, unresolvable civil war.

One would think that when Burns - with his 40-year career of reporting on wars - says somberly that this war does not look as if it's going to turn out well for either Iraq or America, that would be a somewhat persuasive message across political-party lines. And yet he too hears constantly that the New York Times is not reporting the "good news" coming out of Iraq. In that morning's KQED interview, he asked rhetorically whether Americans would prefer a "good-news newspaper," like the Soviet Union's Pravda was, before explaining that journalism's nature "inclines us somewhat more to look at things that go wrong than things that go right."

The torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib by U.S. soldiers was unarguably the biggest single story of the war today, Burns said, calling it "an arrow in the back of every American soldier who goes to Iraq." And yet the Abu Ghraib incidents are not representative of what the U.S. armed forces in Iraq do - building schools, repairing sewage lines, helping Iraqi victims of suicide bombings - and Americans have every reason to be deeply proud of their armed forces in Iraq, he emphasized. "Is that adequately reflected in what we write? I'm afraid to say it isn't…if 52 people get killed in a succession of bombings as they were yesterday in Sadr City in Baghdad, that's a major story. You can't ignore it. We have to dedicate resources to it," Burns explained. "Now, whilst that was going on I have no doubt that there were thousands of American troops doing things of direct and immediate benefit to the Iraqi people."

Weapons of mass distraction

Schell asked Burns if he thought whether the reporting done by fellow New York Times' reporter Judy Miller on Saddam's presumed weapons of mass destruction - reporting that was later shown to be based on manufactured and erroneous intelligence from sources with motives of their own - had overly greased America's path to war. Burns replied at length how Miller was not alone in being duped, that he too could not forgive himself for having failed "to follow through on my own precepts. I thought this man was … a trickster of the highest order," he said. "Why did it never cross my mind that he didn't have them but wanted us to believe that he did?"

Danner swooped in to suggest that the nonexistence of those WMDs had muddied the waters and caused people to forget the original argument, which was still worth debating: "The real question was whether [Saddam's] possession of those weapons justified the war to remove the regime," he argued, adding his contention, which he has held since before the invasion, that American security would almost certainly be degraded by a preemptive war. The WMDs "were in essence a pretext, a symbol," he said. "The war was not under debate" - only the reason for it was.

According to Danner, a government that wants to make a case for war based on classified intelligence is in a very powerful position, "because it can dole out those bits of information to a scoop-hungry press like little sweetmeats," Danner said, gesturing as if teasing a dog at a dinner table. "That's essentially what Judy Miller was made into, a kind of seal who jumped up for these tidbits." After the laughter subsided, Danner acknowledged that other journalists fell into the same subservient trap as Miller, and that she was simply the highest-profile seal.

Anger management

Schell's last question to the assembled journalists was which story from Iraq they would most like to cover if security were not an issue. Spinner quickly said that in an ideal world, she would like to get at the heart of the insurgency, that she cannot understand why the foreign fighters who come to Iraq are tolerated by the Iraqis. Nor can the Iraqis she interviews understand why the world's strongest military power has not yet vanquished the insurgents.

"That is the story," agreed Burns. "Three years into this war and we still don't know who the insurgents are or how they are structured."

Danner detoured back to answer a previous question of Schell's: whether the anger felt toward the media by the U.S. public - including some in the Berkeley audience - was displaced anger that "really wants to be directed at the government, but since the government isn't listening, it gets directed at journalists?"

Journalists, Danner argued, have indeed been getting enough of the story both in Iraq and in Washington, DC, and getting it right. "The conceptual problem has to do with information versus politics," he said.

His argument, essentially, was that the Bush Administration has hijacked reality, and that a confused and angry public has turned to shooting the messenger. Although almost as soon as the invasion commenced, journalists were reporting accurately that the military did not have enough troops to secure the cities - a fact later admitted by figures as high up as Paul Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq - "the problem is that no consequences have flowed from that. No one's been fired, no more troops have been sent.…And that's true of torture, of a lot of other policy failures of this administration," said Danner. "We know about them, yet we keep looking to the press to say, 'You have to prove it, you have to prove it!'"

But not only does the public no longer trust that any such proof from the media can be conclusive, it also sees that nothing happens after it is published, rendering the "truth" of such proof impotent, Danner concluded. "The problem is that this next step after revelation, which is investigation and then punishment - or expiation and political change - hasn't happened."

The evening concluded on this glum note, as Schell deemed it too late to take any questions from the audience. The five journalists were thus left unasked whether they agreed with the spirit of this quotation from Spinner's book - "I didn't become a journalist to serve my country; I became a journalist to serve the story. Dying for my country was not as noble as dying for the truth" - or the follow-up question:

Is it worth risking your life for a truth your countrymen choose not to believe?

A full webcast of "Iraq: Reports from the Frontlines" will be available tomorrow; check back for a link. The forum was part of the Herb Caen/San Francisco Chronicle lecture series, presented by UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, The San Francisco Chronicle and The World Affairs Council.

That assessment is reinforced by Major General Albert Whitley, the most senior British officer with the US land forces. Gen Whitley, in another memo later that summer, expressed alarm that the US-British coalition was in danger of losing the peace. "We may have been seduced into something we might be inclined to regret. Is strategic failure a possibility? The answer has to be 'yes'," he concluded.

The memos were obtained by Michael Gordon, author, along with General Bernard Trainor, of Cobra II: the Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, published to coincide with the third anniversary of the invasion.

The British memos identified a series of US failures that contained the seeds of the present insurgency and anarchy.

The mistakes include:

· A lack of interest by the US commander, General Tommy Franks, in the post-invasion phase.

· The presence in the capital of the US Third Infantry Division, which took a heavyhanded approach to security.

· Squandering the initial sympathy of Iraqis.

· Bechtel, the main US civilian contractor, moving too slowly to reconnect basic services, such as electricity and water.

· Failure to deal with health hazards, such as 40% of Baghdad's sewage pouring into the Tigris and rubbish piling up in the streets.

· Sacking of many of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party, even though many of them held relatively junior posts.

Mr Sawers, in a memo titled Iraq: What's Going Wrong, written on May 11, four days after he had arrived in Baghdad, is uncompromising about the US administration in Baghdad. He wrote: "No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis."

He said the US needed to take action in Baghdad urgently. "The clock is ticking." Both Mr Sawers, who is now political director at the Foreign Office, and Gen Whitley see as one of the biggest errors a decision by Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, and General Tommy Franks, the overall US commander, to cut troops after the invasion.

Mr Sawers advocated sending a British battalion, the 16th Air Assault Brigade, to Baghdad to help fill the gap. Although the US supported the plan, Downing Street rejected it weeks later.

The British diplomat is particularly scathing about the US Third Infantry Division, which he describes as "a big part of the problem" in Baghdad. He accused its troops of being reluctant to leave their heavily armoured vehicles to carry out policing and cites an incident in which British Paras saw them fire three tank rounds into a building in response to harmless rifle fire.

Mr Sawers, who had been British ambassador to Egypt before being sent to Iraq and is at present on a shortlist to be the next ambassador to Washington, sent the memo to Mr Blair's key advisers, including Jonathan Powell, the No 10 chief of staff, and Alastair Campbell, head of the Downing Street press operation at the time.

Mr Sawers, in later memos, welcomed the replacement of Gen Garner with Paul Bremer, a US diplomat. But in a memo written in June 25, Mr Sawyer concluded that, despite Mr Bremer's arrival, the situation was getting worse.

In that memo, Mr Sawers expressed opposition to further troop reductions. "Bremer's main concern is that we must keep in-country sufficient military capability to ensure a security blanket across the country. He has twice said to President Bush that he is concerned that the drawdown of US/UK troops had gone too far, and we cannot afford further reductions," Mr Sawers said.

Throughout his time in Iraq, however, Mr Sawers remained optimistic Mr Bremer would make a difference.

His views in the memo are echoed in a note by Gen Whitley, who says that while Gen Franks took credit for the fall of Baghdad, he showed little interest in the postwar period. "I am quite sure Franks did not want to take ownership of Phase IV," Gen Whitley wrote.

He added that Phase IV "did not work well" because the concentration was on the invasion. "There was a blind faith that Phase IV would work. There was a failure to anticipate the extent of the backlash or mood of Iraqi society."