A car bomb in the north Baghdad neighbourhood of Bab al-Muhaddam killed three people and wounded 25, while another in Tahrir Square in the city centre wounded 15.

Two car bombs also went off within minutes of each other in east Baghdad, wounding nine. A seventh bomb exploded in the upscale Mansur neighborhood, wounding seven.

Six people died in a series of shootings in south Baghdad's restive Al-Dura district, while one civilian was killed near the restive city of Baquba, north of the capital.

Late Sunday, police found the bodies of 15 young men near
Abu Ghraib on Baghdad's western outskirts.

"All the men had bullets in their heads," an interior ministry official said.

Further north, four police and two insurgents were killed in clashes near ousted president Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, police said.

The latest wave of violence came as US President George W. Bush stepped up pressure on Maliki to quickly form a national unity government, with the US military facing one of its bloodiest periods in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

About 60 US servicemen have been killed in Iraq already this month, taking the military's death toll since the invasion to 2,392, according to an AFP count based on
Pentagon figures.

More than four months after the December election for Iraq's first full-term post-Saddam government, political leaders have yet to form a working cabinet after protracted bickering over who should be the next prime minister.

On Saturday, the deadlock appeared broken when the dominant Shiite bloc, the United Iraq Alliance, nominated Maliki as a compromise candidate after the withdrawal of outgoing Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari's candidacy.

On Sunday, Bush telephoned Maliki, as well as re-selected President Jalal Talabani and new parliament speaker Mahmud Mashhadani, urging them to form a national unity government.

"I told them they have awesome responsibilities to their people," Bush said. "They have a responsibility to defeat the terrorists. They have a responsibility to unite their country and I believe they will."

Heavy US military casualties and an upsurge in sectarian violence alongside the longrunning Sunni Arab insurgency have emerged as the major obstacles to US hopes of withdrawing its 130,000 troops three years after the invasion.

US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad also put pressure on Maliki.

"We want him to form as quickly as possible a good, strong cabinet," Khalilzad said Sunday. "It is important that there be a cabinet made up of ministers who will work for all Iraqis and bring Iraqis together."

Hundreds of Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs, have died in sectarian violence since the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in February.

Most of the killings have been blamed on Shiite militias and forces from Baghdad's Shiite-led interior ministry.

Khalilzad renewed calls for the militias to be dismantled.

"We regard the unauthorised military formation as infrastructure of civil war," he said. "Military formations must be in the hands of authorised Iraqi government forces."

Maliki, considered a hardliner, has vowed to rein in militias by integrating them into the security forces.

"Arms must be in the hands of the government. There is a law to integrate militias into the security forces," he said.

Khalilzad is the only US envoy authorised by President George W. Bush to speak to Iranian officials but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Monday there was no longer any need for talks with Iran's arch foe on the situation in Iraq.

"Now we think that, God willing, with the establishment of a stable government in Iraq, there is no more need to do so," the hardline Iranian president said.

Any direct meeting would have marked a break in a near three-decade pause in open bilateral contacts between US and Iranian officials.

"I think it was aggression," he told the cadets assembled in Thayer Hall. "The administration presented it as pre-emption. But it certainly wasn't, in any stretch of the imagination. The world didn't think so either."

A rebuke of American policy is nothing new for the famed intellectual.

Chomsky's "leading terrorist" comment came just two months after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. In defending his remark, Chomsky later told CNN he was referring to America's support of the Contras in Nicaragua.

"The World Court condemned the United States for what it called 'the unlawful use of force and violation of treaties,'" he said. "That's international terrorism."

Born in Philadelphia, Chomsky, 77, has lectured widely on foreign affairs, from Middle East peace to terrorism. Widely considered an expert in the scientific study of language, Chomsky has been an outspoken critic of American wars before, including Vietnam.

He has authored or co-authored more than 200 books and papers in a career that spans five decades, holds a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania and teaches linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Still, Chomsky's stature doesn't mean universal agreement, especially among future soldiers.

"In the military, you ultimately have to follow orders," said Matt Yarnall, a junior from Broken Arrow, Okla. Just war or not, "That decision is made at the top levels of government."

Condoleeza Rice, as National Security Advisor, gave a speech to the American Legion convention in 2003 in which she made comparisons between Iraq and German reconstruction. She cautioned, "There is an understandable tendency to look back on America's experience in postwar Germany and see only the successes, [but] 1945 through 1947 was an especially challenging period. Germany was not immediately stable. SS officers engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them - much like today's Baathist."

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went even farther at the convention. He told the audience, "Nazi regime remnants... plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings. Does this sound familiar?" The only problem with these comparisons is that they're false. The Congressional Research Service (CRS), which acts as the nonpartisan public policy research office of Congress, notes in a new report comparing the occupation of Iraq with that of Germany and Japan, "Iraq faces an insurgency that deliberately sabotages the economy and reconstruction efforts, whereas there were no resistance movements in either Germany or Japan."

In fact, to say that there were no organized resistance movements in post-World War II Germany and Japan is an understatement. Former Ambassador James Dobbins, along with the RAND Corporation, authored a study entitled America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, which determined that there was not a single post-war American combat casualty in Germany or Japan.

In 2003 President Bush gave a speech in which he said, "Following World War II, we lifted up the defeated nations of Japan and Germany, and we stood with them as they built representative governments. We committed years and resources to this cause. America today accepts the challenge of helping Iraq in the same spirit." In reality, there are significant differences between both Germany and Japan and Iraq. Prior to the emergence of militarism in the 1920s, Japan essentially functioned as a constitutional monarchy. And before Hitler rose to power in the 1930s, Germany had a democratic parliamentary government. Iraq, by comparison, has never had a democratic government.

Only a few months ago, Mr. Bush made another comparison when he stated, "After World War II, President Truman believed that the way to help bring peace to Asia was to plant the seeds of freedom and democracy in Japan. Like today, there were many skeptics. Fortunately, President Truman stuck to his guns. The spread of freedom to Iraq requires the same confidence and persistence, and it will lead to the same results." But the CRS report demonstrates that we've already done much more for Iraq than we ever did for Germany or Japan. And it's produced far less results to date.

According to the CRS report, U.S. aid allocations for Iraq over the last three years are $28.9 billion, all of which has been in the form of grants. Almost 62 percent of this went for economic and political reconstruction assistance. The remaining 38 percent was intended to strengthen Iraqi security. For post-World War II Germany, the U.S. provided $29.3 billion (in 2005 dollars) in assistance between 1946 and 1952, consisting of 60 percent in economic grants, 30 percent in economic loans, and 10 percent in military aid.

In Japan, post-war U.S. aid amounted to $15.2 billion (in 2005 dollars) during the same time frame, of which 77 percent was grants and 23 percent was loans. Almost a third of the aid was targeted at economic reconstruction. Comparatively, a greater proportion of Iraqi aid has been provided for economic reconstruction than was the case for Germany or Japan. Total U.S. grant assistance to Iraq over the last three years is approximately equivalent to total loan and grant assistance provided to Germany and almost double that provided to Japan, over a seven year period. And yet the administration has accomplished so little.

It's clear that the Bush administration's analogies between the flawed reconstruction efforts in Iraq and the occupation history of Germany and Japan are inaccurate, if not false. But it should come as no surprise that the Bush administration is attempting to re-write the history of the aftermath of World War II. This administration loves revisionist history. For much of the last three years, the administration has tried to re-write the history surrounding its decision to go to war.

Gene C. Gerard has taught history, religion, and ethics for 14 years at several colleges in the Southwest and is a contributing author to the forthcoming book "Americans at War," by Greenwood Press. He writes a political blog for the world news website OrbStandard at www.orbstandard.com/GGerard.

The revelation, by the CIA's former European chief Tyler Drumheller, was broadcast on CBS's news magazine Sixty Minutes last night and added to the body of evidence that US and British leaders saw the weapons of mass destruction issue only as a selling point for a war they had already decided to wage for other reasons.

According to Mr Drumheller, Western intelligence services were told about Iraq's lack of chemical and biological weapons by Naji Sabri, a former Iraqi foreign minister. The CIA director of the time, George Tenet, took this information straight to President George Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and other senior officials, but it made no impression on them.

* Three American soldiers were killed yesterday when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb north-west of Baghdad. Twenty-three Iraqis also died in other violence yesterday, the day after Iraq's parliament elected a president, two vice-presidents, a parliament speaker and two deputies, which ended a long-standing political deadlock.