Although many of those deaths were caused by insurgent attacks, multi-national forces stationed in Iraq ostensibly to protect the population have been responsible for a significant number post-invasion.

Hundreds of civilians have been killed during major offensives by US-led forces against insurgents in cities such as Falluja, and many others have died after lethal force was used at military checkpoints.

Military commanders have said those killed were "collateral damage" or the unfortunate victims of "crossfire" between their troops and militants.

But the announcement that US military investigators have flown to Iraq to study allegations that their troops deliberately shot dead at least 15 civilians in Anbar Province in November has cast doubt on some of those claims.

'Riddled with bullets'

A US statement at the time said the civilians, including seven women and three children, died in a roadside bomb explosion that also killed a marine in the western town of Haditha.

But survivors and those who saw the bodies said the account was not true.

"Their bodies were riddled with bullets, there was evidence that there had been gunfire inside their homes, there were blood spatters inside their homes," Bobby Ghosh, a journalist who took up the case for Time magazine, told the BBC.

"It was quite clear that these people were killed indoors, which couldn't possibly have happened if they'd been involved in a roadside blast."

An initial military inquiry found the two families had indeed been shot dead in their homes by the marines, but it described the deaths as "collateral damage".

The report has now prompted the US Naval Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS) to determine the motives behind the killing.

The NCIS will have to decide whether the civilians were killed by accident or were targeted by the marines as an act of revenge in a potential war crime.

Several American veterans of the war in Iraq have told the BBC's Newsnight programme that the marines' reaction to the roadside bomb attack in Haditha was not an isolated incident.

Specialist Michael Blake, who served in Balad, said it was common practice to "shoot up the landscape or anything that moved" after an explosion.

'Common practice'

Another veteran, Specialist Jody Casey, who was a scout sniper in Baquba, said he had also seen innocent civilians being killed.

Bombs "go off and you just zap any farmer that's close to you", he said.

Mr Casey said he did not take part in any atrocities himself, but was advised to always carry a shovel. He could then plant this on any civilian victims to make it look as though they were digging roadside bombs.

The US and British governments say the fact the allegations are being investigated at all shows that progress has been made in Iraq.

UK International Development Minister Hilary Benn welcomed the inquiry and said it was important that the perpetrators were being brought to justice.

"The big difference between now and the 30 years that people endured under Saddam is that when things happened nobody was called to account, there was no due process," he said.

'Secrecy'

Although human rights groups have also welcomed the launch of the inquiry, they are quick to point out that the multi-national forces have investigated only a minority of the reports alleging the unlawful or deliberate killing of Iraqi civilians.

Nicole Choueiry, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International, told the BBC News website that those investigations which had taken place had often been inadequate and shrouded in secrecy.

The victims' families are also often unaware of how to apply for compensation.

There are no governmental or judicial bodies in Iraq to investigate human rights violations and the activities of international groups such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have been limited by the deteriorating security situation.

Ms Choueiry believes an official body needs to be set up to ensure multi-national troops fulfil their mission while abiding by international humanitarian and human rights law.

"Whether the investigations are civilian or led by the judiciary, the most important thing is for them to be independent, impartial and transparent," she said.

Immunity

But the effectiveness of such an organisation would be severely restricted by an order originally issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority, and renewed by the Iraqi government in 2004, that grants foreign forces immunity from Iraqi criminal and civil law.

Instead, the troops remain subject solely to the jurisdiction of their own states.

The US and UK have been accused of limiting the number and power of criminal prosecutions - in January, a US officer was punished with a reprimand and a $6,000 fine for killing a captured Iraqi general - or simply not undertaking them at all.

No prosecution was launched after a US marine was filmed shooting dead an incapacitated insurgent in a mosque in Falluja in November 2004.

Phil Shiner, a solicitor representing several Iraqi families taking the British government to court over human rights violations, told the BBC News website the small chance of anything being investigated effectively makes redundant the fourth Geneva Convention, which protects civilians in times of war or under occupation by a foreign power.

"The protection of the fourth Geneva Convention means nothing if the military does not investigate the crime," he said.

Mr Shiner has challenged the immunity of British troops in Iraq and their right to run their own investigations by arguing that European human rights law applied during their operations.

The UK High Court ruled in December that the British government would have to hold an "independent and effective" inquiry into the death of a man from Basra, Baha Mousa, because he died while in British custody.

Although the High Court also said it would be "premature" to conclude the British government was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights before the outcome of the ministry's own investigation was known, such a ruling could have profound consequences for the armed forces.

It has considerably strengthened the case for the prosecution of soldiers found to have acted unlawfully.

I sometimes remember these almost endearing fools when I find myself faced with another kind of war lover - the kind that has not seen war and has often done everything possible not to see it. The passion of these war lovers is a phenomenon; it never dims, regardless of the distance from the object of their desire. Pick up the Sunday papers and there they are, egocentrics of little harsh experience, other than a Saturday in the shopping mall. Turn on the television and there they are again, night after night, intoning not so much their love of war as their sales pitch for it on behalf of the court to which they are assigned. "There?s no doubt," said Matt Frei, the BBC's man in America, "that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East ... is now increasingly tied up with military power."

Frei said that on 13 April 2003, after George W Bush had launched "Shock and Awe" on a defenceless Iraq. Two years later, after a rampant, racist, woefully trained and ill-disciplined army of occupation had brought "American values" of sectarianism, death squads, chemical attacks, attacks with uranium-tipped shells and cluster bombs, Frei described the notorious 82nd Airborne as "the heroes of Tikrit".

Last year, he lauded Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the slaughter in Iraq, as "an intellectual" who "believes passionately in the power of democracy and grass-roots development". As for Iran, Frei was well ahead of the story. In June 2003, he told BBC viewers: "There may be a case for regime change in Iran, too."

How many men, women and children will be killed, maimed or sent mad if Bush attacks Iran? The prospect of an attack is especially exciting for those war lovers understandably disappointed by the turn of events in Iraq. "The unimaginable but ultimately inescapable truth," wrote Gerard Baker in the Times last month, "is that we are going to have to get ready for war with Iran . . . If Iran gets safely and unmolested to nuclear status, it will be a threshold moment in the history of the world, up there with the Bolshevik revolution and the coming of Hitler." Sound familiar? In February 2003, Baker wrote that "victory [in Iraq] will quickly vindicate US and British claims about the scale of the threat Saddam poses".

The "coming of Hitler" is a rallying cry of war lovers. It was heard before Nato's "moral crusade to save Kosovo" (Blair) in 1999, a model for the invasion of Iraq. In the attack on Serbia, 2 per cent of Nato's missiles hit military targets; the rest hit hospitals, schools, factories, churches and broadcasting studios. Echoing Blair and a clutch of Clinton officials, a massed media chorus declared that "we" had to stop "something approaching genocide" in Kosovo, as Timothy Garton Ash wrote in 2002 in the Guardian. "Echoes of the Holocaust", said the front pages of the Daily Mirror and the Sun. The Observer warned of a "Balkan Final Solution".

The recent death of Slobodan Milosevic took the war lovers and war sellers down memory lane. Curiously, "genocide" and "Holocaust" and the "coming of Hitler" were now missing - for the very good reason that, like the drumbeat leading to the invasion of Iraq and the drumbeat now leading to an attack on Iran, it was all bullshit. Not misinterpretation. Not a mistake. Not blunders. Bullshit.

The "mass graves" in Kosovo would justify it all, they said. When the bombing was over, international forensic teams began subjecting Kosovo to minute examination. The FBI arrived to investigate what was called "the largest crime scene in the FBI?s forensic history". Several weeks later, having found not a single mass grave, the FBI and other forensic teams went home.

In 2000, the International War Crimes Tribunal announced that the final count of bodies found in Kosovo's "mass graves" was 2,788. This included Serbs, Roma and those killed by "our" allies, the Kosovo Liberation Front. It meant that the justification for the attack on Serbia ("225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59 are missing, presumed dead", the US ambassador-at-large David Scheffer had claimed) was an invention. To my knowledge, only the Wall Street Journal admitted this. A former senior Nato planner, Michael McGwire, wrote that "to describe the bombing as 'humanitarian intervention' [is] really grotesque". In fact, the Nato "crusade" was the final, calculated act of a long war of attrition aimed at wiping out the very idea of Yugoslavia.

For me, one of the more odious characteristics of Blair, and Bush, and Clinton, and their eager or gulled journalistic court, is the enthusiasm of sedentary, effete men (and women) for bloodshed they never see, bits of body they never have to retch over, stacked morgues they will never have to visit, searching for a loved one. Their role is to enforce parallel worlds of unspoken truth and public lies. That Milosevic was a minnow compared with industrial-scale killers such as Bush and Blair belongs to the former.

Let us think of war crimes as a subset of all crimes. They are those crimes committed in the course of war, start to finish. There are many crimes that we are accustomed to domestically, such as murder, theft, rape, arson, kidnapping, assault, maiming, causing bodily injury, vandalism, and property destruction. We know what these crimes are. They also occur in the course of war. To simplify matters, I speak of all these crimes as one category: crimes against property, or crimes that violate property rights. I do not mean to minimize the severity of the loss of human life by lumping it together with the loss of a building. I mean to make an accurate simplification. Murder is a property crime, since each person owns his own body. Rape violates the property right of a person, since it uses his or her body against his or her will. Kidnapping involves physically controlling a person's body, again a property crime. Obviously crimes like theft, arson, and property destruction all violate property rights. Maiming a person is a crime. I think it helps us to count all these crimes together as one set of property crimes in order to sense the enormity of their totality.

At the orders of the leaders in the Bush Administration, supported by most members of Congress who voted for war resolutions and voted for funding, America instigated the current war on Iraq in March of 2003 and before. If there are war crimes in Iraq, these men and women are most directly responsible. These people and perhaps some others comprise the American State, the organization that marshals our tax dollars and orders the military into action. I leave to others the naming of the names of those most directly responsible for American actions in Iraq. A reasonable indictment should have access to records in order to determine who had what responsibility. Whatever list I might produce here would surely be incomplete and possibly inaccurate. Simply to provide examples, in the Executive branch, certainly President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of State Rice, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld would be indicted. Advisors like Paul Wolfowitz and Steven Hadley might also be. Influential members of the CIA, the military, and the Congress likely also would appear on a list of those who set war crimes into motion.

But I have said "if there are war crimes in Iraq." Have there been American war crimes in Iraq? To answer affirmatively, we need to document three facts: property destruction, American responsibility for property destruction, and criminality of the American acts. I believe that most Americans know that there has been massive property destruction, and they know that Americans are directly responsible for much of it. They have seen some of it on television. However, most Americans probably don't believe that America's acts have been criminal acts.

The property destruction in Iraq is well-known. No one denies it. The only arguments are over how big it has been. A recent BBC News article places civilian Iraqi deaths at a minimum of between 33,710 and 37,832. Other estimates range far higher. No one knows how many Iraqi civilians have been injured. The group Iraq Body Count reports 42,500 injuries. Then there is destruction and damage done to all sorts of goods, from homes to capital goods to possessions. There are vast economic losses as businesses have been disrupted and destroyed. Civilians no doubt have been arrested and, at times, tortured.

The American responsibility for a large fraction of this property destruction is well-known. Our military forces have actively been engaged in it from day one of the war. Domestic Iraqi elements and foreign interlopers have also done their share of crime and destruction. Again, my purpose is not to allocate the crimes among the groups and persons responsible. I am unable to do that. As an American whose taxes support the carnage, who'd like to see it ended, and who'd like to prevent a repeat performance, my interest here is in American culpability, in getting us to clean up our own act. This does not mean I do not condemn the crimes being committed by Arabs, Iraqis, or other nationalities. I do.

This brings us to the third element, which is the criminality of the American acts. There is no doubt that American armed forces and possibly paid civilian contractors have destroyed large amounts of property. They have also seized large amounts of property. Whether or not these are crimes hinges on one question: Were these acts done in self-defense or not? It seems almost self-evident that many property rights violations have been visited upon people who either were not attacking Americans in Iraq or had not attacked them in America. But this is apparently not enough to condemn Americans for their acts. The rules of war allow for "collateral damage." I won't question that doctrine here, although it can be questioned. But collateral damage is only allowable if there is justification for fighting the war in the first place. The major concern is still the criminality or non-criminality of America's presence in Iraq.

The issue of criminality most certainly does not hinge on whether Saddam Hussein was a bad man who mistreated his people, whether he committed atrocities or not, whether he wined and dined terrorists, whether he harbored ambitions to possess stores of biological or chemical weapons, or whether he had invaded Kuwait years earlier upon an American diplomatic snafu. In 2003, there was no self-defense issue involved in any of these activities. It does not hinge on whether he actually had such weapons, whether provided by Americans or developed on his own. Unless he used them on America, there was no self-defense issue involved. And there is no recorded attack by Iraq on America that brought on this war. Perhaps there is some wiggle room when an attack is imminent, perhaps then a country is entitled to attack first. Even in this case, diplomacy often goes on almost to the inception of hostilities. But neither of these was the case between Iraq and the U.S. There was no imminent and no actual attack. Most amazingly we had the spectacle of a President rabidly making speeches about non-existent threats as if they were both real and imminent, from a country that could not possibly launch an attack on the U.S.

Criminality surely does not hinge on whether or not Iraq was or was not a democracy as this has nothing at all to do with self-defense, notwithstanding the ravings of the President and his cabal of neoconservatives. It has nothing to do with bringing freedom to anyone, because this goal also has nothing to do with American self-defense. Whether or not America is capable of bringing freedom and whether or not it has actually done this are pertinent questions and acts much to be doubted, but even if we were capable and did bring freedom to Iraq this would not justify attacking the country. There is no self-defense issue involved in "liberating" Iraq because there has been no attack on America by the Iraqis. While this sounds quite like the Soviet Union's liberation of its satellites after World War II, if we are generous and give the American State the benefit of the doubt as to its honorable intentions, there is still no way to justify the slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqis while liberating their country. But the basic issue remains that doing the supposed good deed of bringing freedom does not excuse acts of aggression. If this rationale for war-making is accepted, which means that committing wrongs to accomplish a supposed right is morally acceptable, then I am justified in cutting out your kidney in order to give it to a person who can't live without it. I am justified in taking your home and turning it over to homeless people. When the President uses such a rationale, he only shows us that he is bereft of proper moral education.

Criminality does not hinge on whether or not the Iraqi people suffered under Saddam Hussein. This has nothing to do with American self-defense. It does not hinge on provocative words or statements uttered by Iraqi leaders, although no one says this brought on the war. Political leaders make all sorts of statements and to construe them as an actual attack that requires self-defense would be folly. That would make for wars at the pleasure of any country that felt itself insulted or threatened by the words of another. This is not to say that there is no situation in which the combination of words and deeds, such as the massing of armies at a border or the sailing of warships or the overflights of airplanes, might trigger hostilities by a party under threat of attack.

Nor does American self-defense hinge on whether or not Iraq did or did not obey various United Nations resolutions or cooperate fully or partially with U.N. officials. Just because there is an international political body that the states have set up does not change the substance of whether acts are criminal or not. The states have anointed the U.N. as a power that provides a legal cover when enough member states have enough votes to act. These political procedures do not mean that all actions taken under the U.N. aegis suddenly become non-crimes or always lawful no matter what their content is. The U.N. is not above the law although it is convenient for it to think it is. Anyway, in the Iraqi case, there was no Iraqi crime committed that justified Americans "defending" themselves by a wholesale attack and bombardment of Iraq and by a continuing war that has created huge property damage in Iraq. If this were so, I think we would hear President Bush reminding us about it today as justification for continuing our defense efforts. We hear nothing of the kind.

We hear that the damage America has done is justified because the world is now a safer place with Saddam toppled from power. But this too, besides being a fantasy, has nothing to do with American self-defense. American and world safety may or may not have been lower with Saddam in office, but that does not justify attacking him. We are not talking about a serial killer haunting the streets of Los Angeles. We are talking about the head of a foreign country and making war on another country, with all its attendant death and destruction. If the U.S. or any other country starts wars on the flimsy basis of increasing its safety, then any country anywhere is justified in starting a war merely by identifying a country, neighboring or otherwise, as reducing its "safety." Hitler surely could, and probably did, justify his many aggressions on grounds such as this. Perhaps he spoke of some other reasons than safety, like Anschluß or Lebensraum, but the basic idea is the same, namely, "we are justified in attacking because it makes us better off." This has nothing to do with self-defense and everything to do with immoral behavior.

The criminality or lack of it in America's actions does not hinge on the pragmatic strategy of attacking the terrorists before they attack us. It's quite obvious that the terrorists who brought down the Trade Towers died in the effort. Their actions trace back to Al-Qaeda, not Iraq, not Saddam Hussein, and still less to the Iraqi people against whom many crimes have been committed. Al-Qaeda fostered a number of terrorist acts in the past 25 years, and no one has ever tied them to Saddam Hussein as the kingpin. He's on trial now, but not for causing terrorism against the United States or Great Britain or Spain or Indonesia. And if there had been evidence that showed Saddam's complicity in international terrorist acts, that still would not have justified the sort of war that America began, executed, and is carrying out today, long after his capture. There is such a thing as a proportionate response to crimes. The damage inflicted by America on Iraq is out of all proportion to the crimes supposedly committed by Saddam Hussein that are supposed to justify the American action.

Were American actions justified by self-defense? The answer is "no." This means that the officials of the American State committed war crimes. This means that they should be indicted and tried for war crimes.

Jarecki interviews subjects from across the political spectrum, including Wilton Sekzer, a retired New York police officer whose son died in the Sep. 11 attack on the World Trade Centre; Bill Kristol, editor of the neo-conservative Weekly Standard; Gore Vidal, a prominent author and liberal commentator; James Roche, secretary of the U.S. Air Force; and U.S. pilots identified as Fuji and Tooms, who dropped the first bombs over Baghdad when the Iraq war broke in 2003.

Following are excerpts from a recent interview IPS conducted with the award-winning filmmaker.

Q: Tell us why you chose this title for your film.

A: Actually, this is the title of a series of films made during World War II by the legendary director Frank Capra. It seems to me that in the past 60 years, the reasons for American war have changed and become far more complicated for everyday people to understand.

The film asks the question, why we fight. I cannot say that it provides an answer, because it wasn't really my goal to provide a single answer. It was my goal to bring together voices from a wide range of experts and the insiders, people touched by American war who could become a kind of chorus of concern looking more deeply at the issues involved and the stakes implied than customarily happens in our shallow news media outlets.

It looks at today's critical situation in Iraq and it's impossible to look at the history of American war over the past half century without naturally being reminded of the crisis in which we now find ourselves.

Q: Have you faced any problems in terms of distribution?

A: If you are a filmmaker trying to cover a politically sensitive subject in the United States, America has suffered such a degradation of our open media system in recent years, such a shift away from the values of a democratic society, that problems arise long before the distribution phase. At the very start, the struggle to get financing for a film like this in the United States would have proved immediately prohibitive. So we moved overseas to the BBC, to Canada, to France and Germany, to countries whose media systems are far more open than ours, and in many ways shame ours.

Q: Has the movie been shown in Iraq?

A: It has not been shown in Iraq. There has been a movement by the British forces television to show the film to their own troops serving in Iraq, but it has not been shown in Iraq.

Q: In the movie, you have interviews with U.S. weapon manufacturers and footage of weapons manufacturing sites. How did you manage to get access to those sites?

A: Well, you know, I worked very hard to reach out to people all across the spectrum, and when you are making a film about war, you are dealing with people at all levels. And in order to secure access to these people, in general one had to go through the Pentagon. We were involved in a very serious inquiry and not in an ambush, a kind of tough love for America and the American story.

Q: You highlighted the speech of U.S. Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961) in which he expresses his deep concern over the "military-industrial complex". Do you agree with those who would rather describe this phenomenon as "military-industrial-prison-media complex"?

A: Yes, unfortunately, what Eisenhower is talking about is the concern that the interests of corporations have been placed ahead of the interests of the people. That can take many forms, whether it's military-industrial or pharmaceutical or media. There are so many industries in America that can have undue, unwarranted influences on the affairs of the state.

In many ways, Eisenhower is simply noting the rise of special interests in the United States. [But] the military-industrial complex has a special distinction as a special interest. The enormity of its business and the way in which it operates it makes more difficult in times of threats [when] you can insulate military-industrial special interests from the kind of oversight and review that others feel might be needed. So the military-industrial complex is a sort of favoured nation among special interests.

Q: You focused on the invasion of Iraq. How do you view the recent developments regarding Iran's nuclear programme and the threats Tehran is facing?

A: I think the concern of course is to what extent the conflict with Iran is another very unfortunate side effect of the calamitous decision on the war in Iraq. You may remember that U.S. policymakers asserted from the start that it would be what they called a "cakewalk". Having gotten rid of Saddam [Hussein], upbeat people would be dancing in the streets, and the country would immediately take a new shape. All of those dreams of course have collapsed. What we now face is a situation of intense chaos. By unseating [Hussein], the United States in many ways liberated the Shia in Iraq and the fundamentalists in Iran who have far more in common with each other.

Q: It is very interesting that in the film you used the footage of [current U.S. Defence Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld's meeting with Saddam Hussein in 1983, when he was the special envoy of Pres. Ronald Reagan.

A: You can't study the history of the current war without following the roots all the way back to the overthrow of Mossedeq (1953) in the interests of British Petroleum. But along the way, there is no way to ignore Ayatollah Khomeini [in Iran]. Along the way, there is no way to ignore Saddam Hussein. No way to ignore that the United States and Saddam Hussein had reasons to ally with each other. The question is, what is it about U.S. foreign policy that makes us these kinds of bedfellows, such that we have to conduct war to unseat them?

Q: Are you hopeful about the realisation of these dreams and aspirations for taking back the republic?

A: I don't know, but I think the hope for America to be a democratic republic is the founding hope. That has always been a work in progress. And there always come challenges. [The communist-hunting Senator Joseph] McCarthy was a challenge, today is a challenge, slavery was a challenge, the death of the Native Americans was a challenge, the eugenics movement before the Second World War was a challenge, the Depression was a challenge.

There have been so many challenges. We have a nation of leaders who cared deeply about this country. But now we face a situation where the stakes are so high that what I would hope to see is that Americans would look into the streets of New Orleans, into the streets of Falluja, and they would see a world that really is not viable. They would see a platform of ideas that are shortsighted, not holistic in nature. These are platforms of ideas that do not meet the needs of everyday people in the shrinking world. And so the question is: Will Americans come to see that with sufficient vigour to have the kind of impact that people need to have on policy and democracy?

U.S. mainstream media reports have focused only on the numbers being killed. But over the past eight months, we have repeatedly emphasized in this column that the far larger numbers of U.S. troops wounded, especially those wounded too seriously to return to active duty, represent a far broader and more statistically significant figure of the scale of insurgent activity and the degree to which it is succeeding or failing to inflict significant casualties on U.S. forces.

The total number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq through Tuesday, March 21 since the start of U.S. operations to topple Saddam Hussein on March 19, 2003, was 2,319, according to official figures issued by the Department of Defense, a rise of 49 in the past 39 days or an average of just over 1.3 killed per day.

The good news is that this is a more than 60 percent improvement on the rate of 3.1 killed per day in early February. And it is a 350 percent improvement on the 33 U.S. soldiers killed in only seven days from Jan. 11 through Jan. 17, an average of 4.7 soldiers killed per day.

The bad news, however, is that in the 39 days from Feb. 11 through March 21, 616 U.S. soldiers were injured in Iraq, an average of 15.8 per day. This was more than twice as bad as the Feb. 4-10 period when 47 U.S. soldiers were injured at an average rate of just under seven per day. And it was also more than 36 percent worse than the rate of the five-day period from Jan. 30 through Feb. 3 when 58 U.S. soldiers were injured, according to the DOD figures, at an average rate of 11.6 per day.

These figures are also of significance in that they represent a trend over almost 40 days -- a far longer period than than the ones in which we usually examine casualty rates and their statistical trends in the conflict.

The number of U.S. troops wounded in action from the beginning of hostilities on March 19, 2003, through March 21, 10, was 17,269, according to the Department of Defense figures.

Some 7,981 of those troops were wounded so seriously that they were listed as "WIA Not RTD" in the DOD figures. In other words: Wounded in Action Not Returned to Duty, an increase of 275 such casualties in 39 days, at an average rate of just over seven injured per day.

This more than twice as bad as the 3.3 per day average of the Feb. 4-10 period and it was almost 50 percent worse than the Jan. 30-Feb. 3 period when 24 U.S. troops were wounded seriously enough that they were not returned to duty at an average rate of 4.8 per day.

These figures should also be seen in the context of another trend in the Iraqi conflict. Since the destruction of the dome of the Golden Mosque in Samara last month, for the first time Iraqi Shiites have started reacting in a popular, violent manner on a broad scale against the Sunni community.

This might be expected to distract the Sunni Muslim insurgents from focusing on targeting U.S. troops and, indeed, just a few days ago USA Today reported a trend we have been monitoring and documenting in this column for almost four months -- the number of attacks and casualties inflicted on U.S. forces has been decreasing somewhat while the insurgents have turned with increasing ferocity first on the new Iraqi security forces and, since January, against Iraqi civilian targets.

However, as we noted above, the capability of the insurgents to go on waging attacks on U.S. forces and increasing the number of them they are injuring has not diminished, it has increased: The insurgency is therefore clearly growing in its capabilities as it has been able to inflict far worse punishment on the Iraqi Shiite community while maintaining or even increasing its rate of casualties inflicted on U.S. troops at the same time.

President George W. Bush's optimism and determination to stay the course in his press conference Tuesday must therefore be tempered by the sobering reality reflected in the statistics issued by his own Department of Defense: There is not the slightest indication that current U.S. strategy and tactics in Iraq are diminishing the popularity and capability of the insurgency. It continues to grow in its tactical capabilities against both U.S. forces and Iraqi civilians.

Even though I had heard the word "again" since my earliest childhood memories, I never had reason to question its meaning. Whether through context or repetition I always assumed that "again" meant just what the AHD said it meant: once more, another time, anew. While I never fell for the old joke where you tell someone, "Did you know that the word 'gullible' is not in the dictionary?," I was gullible enough to believe the AHD's definition of "again." After listening to President Bush's press conference on Tuesday, I am saddened to learn that my dictionary has been lying to me for these last two-plus decades. Old friends, soon departed – and you can keep my dirty paw prints on your outer facing edge as a sendoff!

At yesterday's news conference a reporter asked the President how he would respond to a woman, a waning Bush supporter, who told that same reporter outside a Cleveland hotel after the President's speech on Monday, "He's losing me. He's been there too long. He's losing me." Our commander-in-chief responded,

I also understand the consequences of not achieving our objectives by leaving too early. Iraq would become a place of instability, a place from which the enemy can plot, plan and attack. I believe that they want to hurt us again. (emphasis added)

Iraq will hurt us "again"? Like when the Iraqis flew the planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001? Like when they blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Office Building in Oklahoma City in 1995? Like when they killed 230 Marines with a suicide truck bomb in Lebanon in 1983? If indeed "again" means "one more time," we should all dig deep into our memory banks for the initial incident that sparked such a usage of a seemingly simple word. Before you know it we could be on the receiving end of such ahistorical comments as the one which emanated from Mr. Blutarski in Animal House in which he tried to fire up the troops by reminding them about the Germans bombing Pearl Harbor. At least Mr. Blutarski used grammatically and syntactically correct English. Plus, his comical gross misinformation never caused anyone's death and in fact helped John Belushi's popularity, unlike President Bush's attempt to rationalize The American Occupation of Iraq.

Maybe we should ask Ricardo Barraza, Dale G. Brehm or Nyle Yates III how they would judge the President's use of the word "again." Unfortunately we can't since these three honorable Americans are the latest fallen soldiers, bringing the total number of "Americans No Longer with Us But With Whom I Would Rather Have a Beer Than Anyone in the Current Administration" to 2,311. Two Rangers and a member of the 101st Airborne, killed in combat so that Iraq can not hurt us "again."

One thing I will give the President credit for is his observation regarding the timetable for American withdrawal from The Occupation. Some toadying reporter asked the President if there will "come a day when there will be no more American forces in Iraq?" Sounding like an eminent diplomatic historian of the 20th Century, President Bush sagaciously responded, "That, of course, is an objective. And that will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq." While I am dubious of his claim that evacuating The Occupied Territory is an objective since it directly clashes with our global Wilsonian expansion and nation-building, I have no doubt that future presidents will be the ones who will have to grapple with the decision. On second thought, perhaps they won't grapple with any such decision as I have yet to see even the glimmer of a discussion regarding our occupations of Korea, Japan or the Balkans. As for any "government of Iraq" making such a momentous decision, and the United States actually agreeing to it, I would first expect to see the election of another Polish Pope again. Please tell me if I used the word correctly since my old dictionary is now lying in state.