True, opposition groups occasionally waged mortar and Katyusha rocket attacks at the regime's security forces but we have no instances of Iraqis attacking Iraqis for sectarian, religious or ethnic reasons.

But today mortars and Katyushas are the weapons of choice for armed groups in residential areas of ethnically and religiously mixed cities. Opposing sects in villages now regularly resort to these deadly weapons, fired indiscriminately at civilians. Only God knows how many innocent Iraqis are being killed or maimed as a result of these attacks.

As night falls in Baghdad, mortars and Katyusha rockets begin falling on residential quarters. There is no one to hear or give a damn for the wails of children and women that break the silence of the night in the aftermath of such bombing.

For example, Baghdad at night, home to over five million people, turns into a battlefield. It is a tit for tat between the capital's various residential areas. If a Shiite-dominated quarter fires mortars and Katyushas at a Sunni-dominated area, then it goes without saying that the former will be targeted by the latter almost immediately.

The point is that every night, Baghdad and almost all of Iraq turned into no-man's land. Even the Americans don't have the guts to patrol any part of Baghdad at night.

So, the rebels, insurgents, militants, terrorists, or whatever you want to call them, have the entire arena to themselves.

How can peace and stability return to Iraq if government or occupation troops don't have the courage to remain on the streets of Baghdad and other major cities after 4 pm? There are reports that U.S. and Iraqi troops would like to dig a moat around Baghdad to prevent gunmen from entering the city.

But the gunmen are already inside the city.

Perhaps they will need to build moats separating different quarters of Baghdad and then move on to build walls between certain districts and separate streets from one another by concrete fortifications as is the case with the Green Zone ...

That's because on one level, the NIE, representing the consensus view of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, recognizes the obvious: that the invasion of Iraq has spawned a new generation of Islamic extremists who are determined to strike at the West, that Iraq has served as both a recruitment poster and a training ground for jihadists.

"The Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse" since Sept. 11, 2001, summarized one U.S. intelligence official in referring to the NIE, which was completed in April 2006. [NYT, Sept. 24, 2006]

But to many Americans, this conclusion comes as no surprise. Indeed, it was one of the central arguments of the antiwar movement before the invasion more than three years ago, that an unprovoked invasion of Iraq would inflame anti-Americanism and increase the terrorist threat at home and abroad.

Indeed, I wrote an article before the war essentially making that argument.

"The war's devastation and the U.S. occupation also could play into the hands of [Osama bin Laden, who] spelled out in a recent message that he plans to gain a propaganda advantage from any U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, by presenting himself as the defender of the Arab people," I wrote in February 2003. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Iraq's Liberation Day."]

Widespread Warnings

And it wasn't just journalists and bloggers offering warnings about the war's potential to fuel extremism and deepen the terrorist threat. Respected leaders both inside and outside the U.S. government offered dire warnings over the war's potential consequences.

For example, retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who served as a Middle East envoy for George W. Bush, warned in October 2002 that by invading Iraq, "we are about to do something that will ignite a fuse in this region that we will rue the day we ever started."

Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser in the first Bush administration, said a strike on Iraq "could unleash an Armageddon in the Middle East." Former South African President Nelson Mandela said Bush was "introducing chaos into international affairs."

But George W. Bush brushed aside these warnings and proceeded with the invasion.

As the war and occupation have dragged on, more concerns were raised that heavy-handed U.S. tactics would further inflame Arab anger. Those worries were realized in the devastation of Fallujah, the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, and the massacre at Haditha - not to mention the grisly daily death toll of Iraqi civilians.

Yet, every step along the way, the Bush administration and its allies have bullied their domestic critics. Americans who raised questions before the war were sneered at as "cowards," "dupes" and "traitors."

Then, when the rosy predictions of Iraqis showering U.S. troops with flowers proved false, the administration berated the Iraq War critics some more, accusing them of "defeatism" and insisting that "staying the course" was the only appropriate option.

More recently, the critics have been mocked as "cut-and-runners," while Bush calls the Iraq War the "central front" in the "war on terror," which, in turn, he says is "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21^st Century."

But the downward spiral of the Iraq War and the worsening worldwide terrorism threat are negatives only if one assumes that creating a more peaceful and secure world was the original goal.

If the goal included changing the character of the United States as a free and open society - and consolidating one-party Republican control over the federal budget - then the administration's policies would seem to be working like a charm.

In the United States, which Bush calls part of the "battlefield" in the "global war on terror," fear has prompted millions of Americans to surrender constitutional rights willingly and accept government intrusions that would have been unthinkable before 9/11.

Fanned Fears

These domestic fears have been fanned by government claims of last-minute police actions to stop new acts of al-Qaeda terrorism, which later turn out to be over-hyped public relations stunts.

Since opting to charge alleged "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla with crimes unrelated to original allegations that he was an "enemy combatant" - to avoid a Supreme Court showdown over presidential powers - the Bush administration was dealt another blow on Aug. 21 when a federal judge in Miami threw out one of the administration's charges against the alleged al-Qaeda operative.

U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke dropped a conspiracy charge against Padilla, saying that it violated constitutional prohibitions against double jeopardy. But the judge left intact two other terrorism-related counts against the former Chicago gang member.

Nevertheless, it's becoming increasingly clear that the original allegations against Padilla - an American citizen who was held without charges for 3 ½ years - were deeply flawed. The Padilla case also showed how readily the Bush administration cast aside constitutional guarantees of a speedy trial in which the government must present its evidence in public, one of the most fundamental rights dating back to English common law.

In the administration's other much-touted victory against "homegrown" terrorists, the case of the so-called Miami Seven accused of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, it appears that the alleged plot consisted of little more than loose talk. The accused had almost no ability to pull the scheme off and the case looks more like entrapment by federal agents.

According to court records, government informants provided money and a meeting place for the seven Miami men, gave them video cameras to conduct surveillance, and suggested that the first target of terrorism be a Miami FBI office. Lawyers for the defendants say their clients were lured into the scheme and had no contact with real al-Qaeda members.

Despite the criticism of FBI tactics, it appears that the trend may be towards an even more draconian approach to counter-terrorism efforts. On Aug. 29, the FBI

showcased to reporters a new database with more than 659 million records.

The "Investigative Data Warehouse," as it is called, includes terrorist watch lists, intelligence cables and financial transactions culled from more than 50 FBI and other government agency sources.

Unveiling the database was intended in part to address criticism that the FBI's technology was outdated as the fifth anniversary of 9/11 approached. But the database raised concerns from privacy advocates who worry about how long the government stores such information and about the right of citizens to know what records are being kept.

For instance, anyone who has ever lost or had a passport stolen could be considered suspect, and anyone who has been put on the government's notoriously inaccurate "no-fly" list also could be flagged in the FBI's database. The system includes 250 million airline passenger records, stored permanently.

Gurvais Grigg, acting director of the FBI's Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, said every data source is reviewed by security, legal and technology staff members, and a privacy impact statement is created in order to safeguard civil liberties.

But David Sobel, senior counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the FBI's use of an internal privacy assessment undercuts the intent of the Privacy Act.

NSA Wiretaps

Also of concern is how this new database might use information from the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic surveillance program. The National Counterterrorism Center's terrorist watch list includes at least 325,000 people, and according to an NCTC official, the database includes names of suspected terrorists provided by all intelligence organizations, including NSA.

The NSA program has raised concerns because Bush is asserting that his presidential powers during the "war on terror" trump the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. The eavesdropping is being conducted without court oversight in apparent violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Security Act, passed in response to the COINTELPRO scandal of the 1970s.

At the end of a Senate investigation into domestic intelligence violations, Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, specifically cautioned against the vast potential for abuse if the NSA targeted American citizens.

The NSA's "capability at any time could be turned around on the American people," Church warned, "and no American would have any privacy left ... There would be no place to hide." [NYT,

Dec. 25, 2005]

All of the intelligence organizations, including the FBI, CIA and the NSA, are overseen by the Director of National Intelligence, a position created in early 2005 and now filled by former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte.

But the DNI's independence has always been in doubt. In calling on Congress to create the post of DNI in 2004, Bush made it clear that the director would serve "at the pleasure of the President."

Creating the post of DNI also required extensive revision of the 1947 National Security Act, a Cold War-era law which has undergone further revision since the creation of the DNI. In legislation passed by the House this year, the National Security Act was amended to grant the DNI more power and authority.

The legislation, now before the Senate, provides the DNI new authority to "have access to all national intelligence ... concerning the human intelligence operations of any element of the intelligence community," and authorizes personnel designated by the DNI "to make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in the presence of such personnel."

The new arrest powers follow similar authority granted to the U.S. Secret Service. In the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005, the Secret Service was granted the same power in identical language.

Expanded Powers

Civil libertarians question the steady expansion of government powers within the Executive Branch. This concern has deepened with the tendency of agencies, such as the Secret Service, to engage in law enforcement activities that are political in nature.

During the Bush presidency, the Secret Service has shielded the President from dissenters. Since 2001, the Secret Service has been establishing "free speech zones" for protesters to gather, while police have arrested people who express opposition to Bush's policies outside of the designated areas.

At a Florida Bush rally in 2001, three demonstrators - including two elderly women - were arrested for holding up small protest placards outside the "free speech zone." In 2003, also in Florida, seven protesters were arrested when they refused to be cordoned off into a protest zone hundreds of yards from a Bush rally at USF Sun Dome.

In general, these demonstrators have been arrested by local police at the behest of the Secret Service, but this could change with the new powers granted to the Secret Service by the Patriot Act reauthorization of 2006.

Not only does the law grant the Secret Service new powers of arrest, but it also increases fines and penalties for individuals who "willfully and knowingly ... enter or remain in any posted, cordoned off, or otherwise restricted area of a building or grounds where the President ... will be temporarily visiting."

Beyond expanding powers for the DNI and the Secret Service, Congress also is moving to grant the President more authority over the National Guard.

Governors across the nation are complaining about a bill that has passed the House of Representatives that would expand Bush's authority to take over National Guard troops in case of a natural disaster or a "homeland security threat."

The legislation was criticized by Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Republican, as symptomatic of a wider federal effort to make states no more than "satellites of the national government."

Huckabee, who is chairman of the National Governors Association, said the legislation would end the historic link between the states and their Guard units and "violates 200 years of American history."

Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Democrat, pointed out that for "230-plus years governors have had control of their National Guard and have done a good job," but "all of a sudden, there are one or two lines in a bill that no one has debated and no one has discussed to take that authority away."

While the governors express frustration over the usurpation of authority that has traditionally belonged to the states, there is a larger concern. That is the trend toward centralized authoritarianism that will be accelerated by granting Bush total control over the National Guard.

This trend may speed up even more if Congress effectively grants amnesty to the administration over violations of the Geneva Conventions, and essentially gives the President new authority to interpret Common Article 3, which sets standards for treatment of prisoners of war.

Although billed as a "compromise," the Republican-sponsored legislation provides the Executive Branch legal cover for authorizing interrogation techniques that are widely considered violations of domestic and international law.

War on Iran?

As alarming as the drift towards increased authoritarianism may be, it could pale against what might be in store if the Bush administration attacks Iran over its nuclear program.

In a report for the Century Foundation, retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner asserted that "the summer of diplomacy is over," and argued that "the diplomatic activity of the past several months was just a pretext for the military option."

Dave Lindorff, writing in The Nation,

reported that the Bush administration and the Pentagon have moved up the deployment of a major "strike group" of ships to sail to the Persian Gulf, just off Iran's western coast.

Lindorff points out that "the Eisenhower Strike Group, bristling with Tomahawk cruise missiles, has received orders to depart the United States in a little over a week." Navy sources confirmed that the armada is due off the coast of Iran on or around Oct. 21.

The strongest argument against the possibility of the U.S. striking Iran is that such an attack doesn't make any sense.

Skeptics point out that the military option would likely be counterproductive, if not catastrophic. There are fears that Iran (and perhaps Venezuela) would cut off oil shipments, possibly sending the price of oil to upwards of $200 a barrel. Iran also could launch strikes on Israel, and take revenge against American forces in Iraq.

Furthermore, there is the possibility that Hezbollah sleeper cells exist in the United States, and could be activated by Iran in the event of a U.S. attack. Press reports

indicate that the FBI has launched new probes in New York and other cities targeting alleged members of Hezbollah, in anticipation of a U.S.-Iran showdown.

If the U.S. does launch an attack, it seems clear that the terrorism threat faced by Americans at home and abroad will dramatically increase. For such reasons, many observers argue that an attack on Iran is unlikely.

But Gardiner points out that not making sense won't limit what the Bush administration does. "The 'making sense' filter was not applied over the past four years for Iraq, and it is unlikely to be applied in evaluating whether to attack Iran," Gardiner writes.

It also could be that "making sense" means something different for the Bush administration than it does for average Americans.

Although the Iraq War has cost about 2,700 American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars from the Treasury, the war has created great business opportunities for well-connected corporations such as Halliburton and Bechtel, which have registered substantial profits from the occupation and "rebuilding" of Iraq.

Also, although U.S. intelligence agencies now agree that the terrorist threat has ballooned due to the Iraq War, the Bush administration has found the conflict useful in simultaneously expanding its powers, abrogating constitutional rights and justifying more government secrecy.

Those trends seem likely to continue - and even accelerate - as the "war on terror" remains a powerful excuse for transforming the United States from a historically free and open society to a frightened nation where citizens eagerly trade their constitutional rights for government promises of more security.

But after listening to two Kurdish witnesses, Saddam again began to argue and the judge lost his patience.

"You are a defendant and I'm a judge," Ureybi said. "Shut up, no-one talk ... The court has decided to eject Saddam Hussein from court."

As Saddam left smiling, his six co-defendants - top officials under Saddam - stood and tried to follow him out, demanding they leave too. The judge shouted back: "Get Saddam out and put the others back in their seats."

Several co-defendants started shouting and pointing fingers at the judge. Ureybi ejected one, former defense minister Sultan Hashim, before ordering a recess.

Unusually, the sound was left on for television broadcasts, allowing all Iraqis to watch and listen as pandemonium broke out in the courtroom for several minutes.

PREVIOUS JUDGE FIRED

Saddam was also expelled from the courtroom during the last two hearings for protesting against the sacking of Ureybi's predecessor as chief judge, Abdullah al-Amiri. The government fired Amiri last week for saying Saddam was "not a dictator".

Saddam and the other six could face hanging over the deaths of an estimated 180,000 Kurdish villagers in 1988, including thousands killed by poison gas.

He and his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid - dubbed "Chemical Ali" by Iraqis - face genocide charges. Five others face charges of mass murder and crimes against humanity.

International legal rights groups have said the sacking of the judge could hurt the legitimacy of the outcome of the trial. But prosecutors said Amiri had been too lenient, allowing Saddam to threaten witnesses. He once told accusers in court he would "crush their heads".


The trial has featured moving testimony from villagers recounting their suffering during the Anfal - "Spoils of War" - campaign, when Saddam's forces attacked Kurds accused of helping Iran during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.

Before Saddam was ejected on Tuesday, the court heard from Aasi Mustafa Ahmed, a villager in his 50s who said he had been an Iraqi army conscript and prisoner of war in Iran. When he returned home in 1990 he found his house destroyed and his wife and four children missing, never to be seen again.

Asked if he sought compensation, he said: "If you gave me the whole world, it wouldn't make up for one of my children's fingernails."

All the defense lawyers walked out last week after Amiri was sacked as chief judge and have not returned, but court-appointed lawyers are in place.

At the same time, the army has been forced to extend the combat tour of a key infantry brigade in strife-torn al-Anbar province to allow the battle-weary unit that is due to replace it to enjoy the minimum 12-month interval between tours at the front.

The move affects 4,000 men of the 1st Brigade of the 1st Armoured Division, currently based at Ramadi in the heart of the \"Sunni Triangle\", who will now have to spend an extra six weeks there before returning to their base in Germany in February.

The announcement by the Pentagon yesterday is the latest evidence of how the long war in Iraq and the intensifying conflict in Afghanistan are stretching the army\'s resources to the limit and beyond. Far from cutting back on Iraq deployment, as the Bush administration had hoped, the Pentagon has had to boost US troop strength in recent months to some 145,000, as sectarian violence has intensified.

No less indicative has been the extraordinary decision by General Schoomaker not to present a budget for the financial year starting in October 2007.

This week, Congress will approve a Pentagon budget for the year starting this October of a total $447bn (£235bn) for defence, including a basic army budget of $98bn, as well as a special $70bn supplementary fund to pay for the two wars, and replace equipment lost or worn out in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But General Schoomaker insists this is far short of what is required. According to the Los Angeles Times yesterday, he wants $139bn for the army in 2007-08 - more than $25bn above the limit set by Mr Rumsfeld - and a 41 per cent increase on the allocation for 2006-07. In the end, he chose to miss the 15 August deadline for submission of a budget.

The Defence Secretary has since agreed to a study group, which is understood to basically agree with Gen Schoomaker. But after years of watching their basic budget requests chipped away by Mr Rumsfeld and various congressional committees, army chiefs are now in little mood to compromise.

The army has a total active-duty strength of 504,000, of whom 400,000 have done at least one tour in either Iraq and Afghanistan, and some 150,000 have done two.

Barring an unlikely improvement in the security situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, such pressures will remain. If funding is not increased, the alternatives are uniformly unattractive. The army could scale back its commitments. If not, commanders admit, it will have to make greater use of the National Guard. A third possibility would be the reintroduction of the draft, but that is flatly opposed by President Bush and Mr Rumsfeld.

* Three Marines will face courts-martial on charges of murdering an Iraqi man in the town of Hamdania. The three were among seven Marines and one Navy serviceman accused of kidnapping and murdering 52-year-old Hashim Ibrahim Awad last April. The other five face preliminary hearings in coming weeks.

The rare criticism from the three officers, all veterans of the Iraq war, is an embarrassment to Mr Bush at a time when his party had hoped to campaign on its strong leadership in the "war on terror".

The officers echoed the findings of the National Intelligence Estimate at the weekend, which said the Iraq war had fuelled Islamist extremism around the world. They also accused the Pentagon of putting soldiers' lives at risk by failing to provide the best equipment available. "Why are we asking our soldiers and marines to use the same armour we found was insufficient in 2003?" asked Thomas Hammes, a retired Marine Corps colonel.

The criticism comes amid an unprecedented show of defiance from the army chief, Gen Schoomaker. The general refused to submit a budget plan for 2008 to Mr Rumsfeld, arguing the military could not continue operations in Iraq and its other missions without additional funds, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday. The seriousness of the protest was underlined by Gen Schoomaker's reputation as an ally of the Pentagon chief. The general came out of retirement at Mr Rumsfeld's request to take up the post.

"It's quite a debacle," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute thinktank. "Virtually everyone in the army feels as though their needs have been shortchanged."

Gen Schoomaker's defiance gives a voice to growing concern within the military about the costs of America's wars, and the long-term strain of carrying out operations around the world.

For the past three years, the $400bn (£210bn) cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been funded by emergency spending bills passed by Congress. But Gen Schoomaker and others say the Iraq war has also put a severe strain on regular budgets. That puts the generals at odds with Mr Rumsfeld's strategic vision of a more nimble, hi-tech military. In addition, Congress and the White House have cut a number of army spending requests over the past months. "There is no sense in us submitting a budget that we can't execute, a broken budget," he told a Washington audience.

As the war in Iraq continues with no sign of a reduction in US forces, military officials have repeatedly complained about the strain on personnel, and say they fear they may be forced to rely more heavily on the National Guard and reservists to meet the demands of overseas deployments. General John Abizaid, America's senior commander in the Middle East, said last week there was little chance of any drawing down of the 140,000 forces in Iraq before next spring.

The burden of that commitment was underlined yesterday when the army extended the combat tours of about 4,000 soldiers serving in the Ramadi area.

In Basra yesterday, British troops killed a prominent al-Qaida figure who was hiding in Iraq after escaping from US custody in Afghanistan last year, the ministry of defence said. Omar Faruq was shot dead while resisting arrest during a pre-dawn raid by 250 soldiers after a long-planned intelligence-led operation. A British military spokesman described Faruq as a "very, very significant man".

Schoomaker failed to submit the budget plan by an Aug. 15 deadline. The protest followed a series of cuts in the service's funding requests by both the White House and Congress over the last four months.

According to a senior Army official involved in budget talks, Schoomaker is now seeking $138.8 billion in 2008, nearly $25 billion above budget limits originally set by Rumsfeld. The Army's budget this year is $98.2 billion, making Schoomaker's request a 41% increase over current levels.

"It's incredibly huge," said the Army official, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity when commenting on internal deliberations. "These are just incredible numbers."

Most funding for the fighting in Iraq has come from annual emergency spending bills, with the regular defense budget going to normal personnel, procurement and operational expenses, such as salaries and new weapons systems.

About $400 billion has been appropriated for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars through emergency funding measures since Sept. 11, 2001, with the money divided among military branches and government agencies.

But in recent budget negotiations, Army officials argued that the service's expanding global role in the U.S.-declared war on terrorism - outlined in strategic plans issued this year - as well as fast-growing personnel and equipment costs tied to the Iraq war, have put intense pressure on its normal budget.

"It's kind of like the old rancher saying: 'I'm going to size the herd to the amount of hay that I have,' " said Lt. Gen. Jerry L. Sinn, the Army's top budget official. "Schoomaker can't size the herd to the size of the amount of hay that he has because he's got to maintain the herd to meet the current operating environment."

The Army, with an active-duty force of 504,000, has been stretched by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. About 400,000 have done at least one tour of combat duty, and more than a third of those have been deployed twice. Commanders have increasingly complained of the strain, saying last week that sustaining current levels will require more help from the National Guard and Reserve or an increase in the active-duty force.

Schoomaker first raised alarms with Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in June after he received new Army budget outlines from Rumsfeld's office. Those outlines called for an Army budget of about $114 billion, a $2-billion cut from previous guidelines. The cuts would grow to $7 billion a year after six years, the senior Army official said.

After Schoomaker confronted Rumsfeld with the Army's own estimates for maintaining the current size and commitments - and the steps that would have to be taken to meet the lower figure, which included cutting four combat brigades and an entire division headquarters unit - Rumsfeld agreed to set up a task force to investigate Army funding.

Although no formal notification is required, Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey, who has backed Schoomaker in his push for additional funding, wrote to Rumsfeld early last month to inform him that the Army would miss the Aug. 15 deadline for its budget plan. Harvey said the delay in submitting the plan, formally called a Program Objective Memorandum, was the result of the extended review by the task force.

The study group - which included three-star officers from the Army and Rumsfeld's office - has since agreed with the Army's initial assessment. Officials say negotiations have moved to higher levels of the Bush administration, involving top aides to Rumsfeld and White House Budget Director Rob Portman.

"Now the discussion is: Where are we going to go? Do we lower our strategy or do we raise our resources?" said the senior Pentagon official. "That's where we're at."

Pressure on the Army budget has been growing since late May, when the House and Senate appropriations committees proposed defense spending for 2007 of $4 billion to $9 billion below the White House's original request.

Funding was further complicated this summer, when rising sectarian violence in Baghdad forced the Pentagon to shelve plans to gradually reduce troops in Iraq.

Because of those pressures, the Army in July announced it was freezing civilian hiring and new weapons contract awards and was scaling back on personnel travel restrictions, among other cost cuts.

Schoomaker has been vocal in recent months about a need to expand war funding legislation to pay for repair of hundreds of tanks and armored fighting vehicles after heavy use in Iraq.

He has told congressional appropriators that he will need $17.1 billion next year for repairs, nearly double this year's appropriation - and more than quadruple the cost two years ago. According to an Army budget document obtained by The Times, Army officials are planning repair requests of $13 billion in 2008 and $13.5 billion in 2009.

In recent weeks, however, Schoomaker has become more publicly emphatic about budget shortfalls, saying funding is not enough to pay for Army commitments to the Iraq war and the global strategy outlined by the Pentagon.

ADVERTISEMENT"There's no sense in us submitting a budget that we can't execute, a broken budget," Schoomaker said in a recent Washington address.

Military budget expert Steven M. Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent Washington think tank, said that despite widespread recognition that the Army should be getting more resources because of war-related costs, its share of the Defense Department budget has been largely unchanged since the 2003 invasion.

However, a good portion of the new money the Army seeks is not directly tied to the war, Kosiak cautioned, but rather to new weapons it wants - particularly the $200-billion Future Combat System, a family of armored vehicles that is eventually to replace nearly every tank and transporter the Army has.

"This isn't a problem one can totally pass off on current military operations," Kosiak said. "The FCS program is very ambitious - some would say overly ambitious."

Even with Rumsfeld's backing, any request for an increase could force a conflict with the White House Office of Management and Budget, which has repeatedly pushed the Pentagon to restrain its annual budget submission.

"Year after year there were attempts to raise the ceiling, but year after year OMB has refused," said a former Pentagon official familiar with the debate. "The difference this year is the Army has said that if a raise in the ceiling isn't going to be considered, they won't even play the game."

Added the senior Army official: "If you're Rob Portman advising the president of the United States and duking it out with the secretary of Defense, it's a pretty sporting little event."

Army officials said that Schoomaker's failure to file his 2008 Program Objective Memorandum was not intended as a rebuke to Rumsfeld, and that the Defense secretary had backed Schoomaker since the chief of staff raised the issue with him directly.

Still, some Army officials said Schoomaker expressed concern about recent White House budget moves, such as the decision in May to use $1.9 billion out of the most recent emergency spending bill for border security, including deployment of 6,000 National Guard troops at the Mexican border.

Army officials said $1.2 billion of that money came out of funds originally intended for Army war expenses.

"The president has got to take care of his border mission; he needs to find a source of funds so he can play a zero-sum game - he takes it out of defense," the senior Army official said. "But when he takes it out of defense, the lion's share is coming out of the outfit that's really in extremis in the current operating environment in the war."

Rumsfeld has not set a new deadline for the Army to submit its budget plan. The Army official said staffers thought they could submit a revised plan by November, in time for President Bush to unveil his 2008 budget early next year.

Army Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command oversees the war, said last week that the United States is unlikely to begin cutting its forces in Iraq before the middle of next year.

He said the United States might even increase the size of its force from the current 147,000.

U.S. troop levels have increased by 20,000 since late July. They peaked at about 160,000 late last year.

In June, when there were 127,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, U.S. commanders proposed bringing home two brigades of about 3,500 each this month and one or two more by the end of the year.

Rangel's views on funding the war are shared by many of his colleagues - especially within the 73-member Out of Iraq Caucus.

Some Democratic legislators want to halt funding for the war immediately, while others say they would allocate money for activities such as reconstruction, setting up international security forces, and the ultimate withdrawal of U.S. troops.

"Personally, I wouldn't spend another dime [on the war,]" said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.).

Woolsey is among the Democrats in Congress who are hoping to control the power of the purse in 2007 to force an end to the war. Woolsey and some of her colleagues note that Congress helped force the end of Vietnam War by refusing to pay for it.

Democrats in the House and Senate are united in their effort to conduct more oversight of the Bush administration's management of the Iraq war, but are not on the same page on how to fund it.

While the Senate could switch hands, political analysts say the House is more likely to flip.

Having lost the last two elections in part because of national security issues, Democratic leaders have been reluctant to spell out their exact Iraq war funding strategy.

"I don't think the Democratic leadership should put that out at the moment," Woolsey said.

But Democratic leaders will be under tremendous pressure from campaign donors and activists to take bold steps on Iraq should they be setting the legislative agenda in the 110th Congress.

"If we have the majority, it'll be because of Iraq," said Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii).

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democrats have called for a reduction in troops to begin no later than the end of 2006, but as Speaker, she could have significant power over troop levels in 2007.

"[Pelosi] has consistently stated that Congress must ensure that our troops have the resources they need," said Pelosi spokesman Drew Hamill.

Some Democratic congressional candidates have not embraced their leadership's position of a troop withdrawal timetable in Iraq and conservative Democratic members in the House and Senate could also prove problematic in close budget and appropriations votes.

The Out of Iraq Caucus represents less than 40 percent of Democrats in the House. However, the group consists of many senior lawmakers, including a one Democratic leader, Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), eight who are in line to chair panels, the next head of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-Mich.), and eight appropriators.

Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), the ranking member of the Appropriations defense subcommittee and the most outspoken Democrat on withdrawing from Iraq, has said he will mount a bid for majority leader should Democrats win the House in November. His bill to redeploy forces from Iraq has 105 cosponsors.

Still, Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass.), who has a bill seeking to prohibit funds to deploy armed forces to Iraq, says Democrats "have various positions on the war" and is skeptical that leadership will adopt an approach similar to his legislation.

He noted that his bill does not have many cosponsors (it has 18), and said despite the influential members of the Out of Iraq Caucus, "we all have one vote."

Republicans are quick to portray talk of withdrawal as a "cut-and-run" strategy as they seek to mock Democrats on homeland security weeks before Nov. 7.

The Bush administration has previously indicated that it presumes that Democrats may attempt to cut off funding for the war if they win control of Congress next year. But the political battle over the war may be fiercer than some White House officials anticipate.

According to a report in The Washington Post last month, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino asked, "How would they force the president to withdraw troops? Yell?"

Battling the White House on the war would be challenging, Democrats say, but they would be emboldened by the election results and Bush's standing as a lame-duck president with low approval ratings.

Abercrombie stressed that Democrats are not going to sever funding for the troops. Cutting off funding is "easy to say and another thing to do," according to Abercrombie.

What's more like likely, he said, is to fund the conflict in a way that will end the war by reallocating money to new initiatives.

"We're going to continue to give the troops everything they need," said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

A House Democratic leadership aide said, "The bottom line is that should Democrats regain the House, Democrats will leave no soldier left behind in Iraq. As long as there's soldiers in the battlefield, funding will continue."

If Democrats control Congress, that funding likely would have strings attached. Most Senate Democrats backed a nonbinding measure earlier this year crafted by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) that called for troops to begin to withdraw from Iraq, but the amendment did not set a withdrawal deadline. Another amendment offered by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) set a redeployment of troops to be substantially completed by July 1, 2007 was soundly defeated, attracting only 13 votes. The Levin amendment fell short as well, garnering 39 votes.

Rep. John Spratt (D-S.C.), a Democratic leader in line to become the House Budget Committee chairman if Democrats win control of the House, said last month that he does not favor an immediate withdrawal: "I think we should tell the Iraqis that we're not going to pull out immediately. We're seeking still some positive outcome. We won't leave them in a lurch, but at the same time, we're not going to be there indefinitely or forever..." Spratt is in a challenging race to keep his seat this fall.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), chair of the Out of Iraq Caucus, declined to comment for this article.

Our blindness back in April 2003 seems ludicrous in retrospect. As the looting flared, an oblivious President Bush told the Iraqi people in a televised address that they were "the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity." Our actions - or, more accurately, our inaction as the artifacts of that great civilization were carted away - spoke louder than those pretty words. As Fred Ikle, the Reagan administration Pentagon policy chief, puts it in Thomas Ricks's "Fiasco," "America lost most of its prestige and respect in that episode."

That disaster might have been mitigated if our leaders had not dismissed the whole episode as a triviality. But Donald Rumsfeld likened the chaos to the aftermath of a soccer game and joked that television was exaggerating the story by recycling video of a single looter with a vase. Gen. Richard Myers defended our failure to intervene as "a matter of priorities" (we had protected the oil ministry). Lt. Gen. William Wallace, countering a wildly inflated early claim by a former museum employee that 170,000 artifacts had been destroyed, put the number of objects still unaccounted for at "as few as 17." (The actual number was closer to 14,000.)

The war's many cheerleaders in the press fell into line. In keeping with the mood of the time, administration enforcers like Charles Krauthammer and Andrew Sullivan damned Mr. Rumsfeld's critics as fatuous aesthetes exploiting a passing incident to denigrate the liberation of Iraq. In a column in Salon titled "Idiocy of the Week" (that idiot would be me), Mr. Sullivan asked rhetorically who was right about "the alleged ransacking" of the museum, Mr. Rumsfeld or his critics? "Rummy, of course. He almost always is."

Of course, dear old Rummy's what-me-worry take on the museum was the tip-off to how he would be wrong about everything that would follow: he reacted with exactly the same disdain and indifference to the insurgency happening under his own nose and to Abu Ghraib. There would be a hasty corrective to the looting, at least: a heroic Marine Reserve colonel, Matthew Bogdanos, commanded a team that ultimately tracked down a bit more than a third of the vanished objects. (It was too late to rescue tens of thousands of additional treasures in Iraq's National Library and National Archives, both also looted and torched.) But Mr. Rumsfeld's "Stuff happens!" proved indelible because it so resonantly set forth an enduring theme of the occupation: that the Americans in charge of Iraq were contemptuous of the local populace to whom they were so grandly bequeathing democracy and other fruits of civilization.

The cavalier American reaction to the museum looting was mimicked in the $22 billion reconstruction effort, an orgy of corruption and waste that still hasn't brought Iraqis reliable electricity. In a new account of the civilian nation-builders in the Green Zone, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post details how L. Paul Bremer III and his underlings enlisted cronies and apparatchiks rather than those who might actually know anything about the country's people or their needs. Thus we saddled Iraq with Bernie Kerik, G.O.P. fund-raisers and politically connected young ideologues chosen over more qualified job applicants who knew Arabic. They saw Iraq as a guinea pig for irrelevant (and doomed) experiments, including an antismoking campaign and an elaborate American-style stock exchange. Mr. Chandrasekaran's book, while nonfiction, is as chilling an indictment of America's tragic cultural myopia as Graham Greene's prescient 1955 novel of the American debacle in Indochina, "The Quiet American."

Our public diplomacy efforts were equally tone-deaf to Iraqis and their neighbors. In the early going, the State Department hired a Madison Avenue whiz who made sunny TV testimonials about America's love of Muslims. These ads won no hearts or minds, but wasted tons of money and even more valuable time. Now this job belongs to Karen Hughes, the presidential flack, whose patronizing photo-op tour of the region last year earned mostly ridicule.

Our broadcasting outreach there is supervised by a longtime Karl Rove pal, Kenneth Tomlinson, who last month was found by State Department investigators to be using his office - literally - to run a "horse-racing operation." One of Mr. Tomlinson's thoroughbreds is named Karzai, in supposed honor of the Afghan president. If that's his idea of lifting America's image in the Muslim world, he might as well be on Al Jazeera's payroll. On Wednesday, ABC News reported the bottom line of such P.R. misfires: a confidential Pentagon survey found that 75 percent of Iraq's Sunni Muslims support the insurgency, up from 14 percent in 2003.

Speaking before the United Nations last week in what may be the run-up to our new war, Mr. Bush was still on his battle-for-civilization kick, flattering Iranians much as he has the Iraqis. "We admire your rich history, your vibrant culture, and your many contributions to civilization," he said. All Iranians have to do is look to the Baghdad museum today to see that such words are worth no more now than they were in 2003.

It's symbolic of the anarchy throughout Iraq's capital that the museum's entrances are now sealed with concrete to keep out new hordes of killers and thieves. But the violence, which seems to spiral with each declaration of a new security crackdown, is old news. More revealing is the other half of the museum's current plight: it is now in the hands of Iraq's version of the Taliban. That sad denouement is another symbol, standing for our defeat in the larger war of ideas.

The museum changed hands in August, when Donny George, its longtime administrator and the chairman of Iraq's official antiquities board, fled the country fearing for his life and for the treasures in his care, both at the museum and the country's many archaeological sites. Mr. George is a Christian and had good reason to fear. The new government minister placed in charge of the museum, a dentist, is an acolyte of the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose goal is to make Iraq a fundamentalist theocracy. To Mr. Sadr and his followers, the museum's legendary pre-Islam antiquities, harking back to the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, are infidels' idols to be sacked.

You might think, given Mr. Sadr's radicalism, that he is a fugitive terrorist on the lam as, say, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was. After all, Mr. Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, is a font of death squads at the heart of the sectarian warfare; he's an enthusiastic ally of Hezbollah besides. But he is instead a major player in the "democracy" we have installed in Iraq, controlling at least 30 of 275 seats in the Parliament and six government ministries, including the power centers of transportation and health.

Back in 2004, the Americans made plans to take down Mr. Sadr, but as Larry Diamond, a senior adviser to the coalition authority in Baghdad, writes in his book "Squandered Victory," those plans were shelved for "various reasons, including political calculations in Washington." American forces arrested some Sadr aides last week, but such periodic skirmishes notwithstanding, his influence continues to grow. He is a crucial ally of the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, who would not be in office without his support. In the past few days, both Tony Snow and Condi Rice have been reaffirming that the administration has what the secretary of state called "enormous confidence" in Mr. Maliki, despite Washington chatter to the contrary.

One of the first Westerners to warn strongly of the dangers of someone like Mr. Sadr was Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), the legendary archaeologist, explorer, author and British political officer who masterminded the unlikely cobbling together of the modern Iraq state after World War I. She warned that a Shiite theocracy in the new country would be "the very devil." As it happened, it was also Bell who created the Iraqi National Museum in 1923.

The fortunes of her museum, once considered the finest in the Middle East, have been synonymous with the fate of Iraq ever since. That's because, like any such national institution, it is not merely some building that houses art but a repository of a country's heart and soul. That America has stood helplessly by as Mr. Sadr folds the museum into his orbit of power is as ominous a predictor of what lies ahead in this war as was our callous reaction to the looting of 2003. For all of America's talk of stamping out a "murderous ideology" and promoting civilization and democracy in Iraq, we are now handing the very devil the keys.

Many of the victims were burned to death. Two dozen of the dead were women or girls, as were 26 of the 36 wounded, the hospital officials said. The blast struck at the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan, in which more attacks were expected, given what has happened in past years, according to American and Iraqi officials.

Elsewhere, four Americans were killed. One soldier died after his vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb in northern Baghdad on Saturday. Two other soldiers died and three were wounded when a roadside bomb struck their patrol near Kirkuk. An American working as a State Department contractor was killed Friday during a rocket attack in the southern city of Basra, and a Danish soldier was reported killed by a roadside bomb in Basra.

A senior military official in Baghdad said some death squad members captured since United States forces began sweeps through the capital last month also worked for or had affiliation with the Ministry of Interior or other government agencies.

American troops have killed 25 death squad members and captured 215 more since the sweeps began, the official said, adding that most have not had governmental affiliations. There are now 23 militias in Baghdad, said the official.

"There's a political piece to this to see if they deal with these guys, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the issue. "There is corruption and problems in some of these ministries, but it's got to be dealt with and it ought to be dealt with by the prime minister and the folks that are inside this government."

After the Sadr City blast, a Sunni insurgent group issued an Internet statement claiming credit, and saying the bombing was retaliation for Shiite militia attacks on Sunnis.

Some residents of Sadr City, a huge Shiite slum in northern Baghdad, said the attackers appeared to have exploited the fact that Saturday was the designated day for women to receive long-delayed allotments of kerosene in the Dakhil neighborhood. Men were scheduled to line up for fuel on Sunday, but attacking on Saturday would be easier, they said, because women are often not searched before they join the line.

Some reports quoted the police as saying that the bomb was hidden in a barrel, or in a car parked near the tanker.

Yet Bassim Mohammed, a 40-year-old worker, said one woman pretended she had shown up to receive kerosene but instead carried a bomb hidden inside an empty fuel can. The bomb was apparently detonated by remote control after the woman left, he said.

"It was like an oven," said Mr. Mohammed, who was fighting back tears as he recounted the blast. "Bodies were burned everywhere. I saw seven bodies of small boys. They are just boys! They did nothing. Why do they attack us?"

The casualty toll was worsened, he said, because concrete barriers near the line made it hard for people to flee the blast and the resulting fire.

In another grisly attack, gunmen riding in BMW's discarded nine severed heads in a square in downtown Bayji, north of Baghdad. The gunmen clashed with the police before escaping, according to a Salahaddin provincial spokesman. One of the victims was an interpreter for American forces and the others were army recruits, he said.

A group linked to Al Qaeda posted a Web video on Saturday purporting to show the bodies of two American soldiers being dragged behind a truck and then set on fire, The Associated Press reported.

The Mujahedeen Shura Council - an organization of insurgent groups, including Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia - posted a previous video in June showing the soldiers' mutilated bodies, and claiming that it killed them. It was not clear whether video posted Saturday was a continuation of that footage, or why it was released.

In Baghdad, the Iraqi military said American and Iraqi troops captured a leader of one of the most vicious Sunni terrorist groups, Ansar al-Sunna, during a raid early Saturday morning in the restive town of Miqdadiya, northeast of Baghdad. The raid captured Muntasir Hammoudi Alaiwi and two other insurgents, said Brigadier Qassim al-Mussawi. The group took credit for the December 2004 bombing of an Army mess tent in Mosul that killed 18 Americans and four others.

Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting.

Corps officials acknowledged Friday that the technique was improper but said that there was no intent to deceive. They said that the entries were designed to ensure that the government had enough money on hand to pay contractors already at work in Iraq.

After being confronted with the audit's findings, corps officials changed the entries in the database to reflect that the money was being used to close down existing contracts in Iraq, the agency said.

"It wasn't the proper bookkeeping way to do this," said Suzanne Fournier, the corps' chief spokeswoman. "Apparently someone didn't understand that."

The audit by the Special Inspector General for the Reconstruction of Iraq is the latest to raise questions about accounting for the multibillion-dollar program, which has been plagued by accusations of waste, fraud and corruption.

At issue is $18 billion in funding approved by Congress in November 2003 to build new schools, power stations and sewage treatment plants in Iraq. At the time, Congress ordered that the funds be spent by Sept. 30.

Iraq's violence and continually shifting government priorities bogged down the pace of the rebuilding effort, leaving the corps with nearly $1 billion still to spend.

To prevent the money from reverting back to the Treasury, Corps officials in Iraq listed the "Dummy Vendor" as receiving 96 different contracts to build infrastructure for oil, electricity and other sectors, the audit said.

Such accounting trickery is not confined to Iraq.

The U.S. Special Operations Command, based in Tampa, Fla., was accused of "parking" $20 million in 2003, leading to language in this year's Defense Department budget to criminalize the practice.

That bill has yet to pass, and the inspector general for Iraq, Stuart Bowen, found no criminal wrongdoing involved in the corps' use of the dummy vendor. "We do not believe ... there was any attempt to mislead on the true status" of the contracting process, the audit said. Bowen was in Iraq and unavailable for comment.

The audit marks the second time in recent months that a government agency has been charged with accounting improprieties.

The U.S. Agency for International Development was accused in June of resorting to accounting tricks in an effort to hide the spiraling costs of a children's hospital in Iraq, a project that received special backing from First Lady Laura Bush.

San Francisco-based Bechtel, the chief contractor, was removed from the project after the inspector general determined that the cost to finish the hospital had soared from $50 million to almost $170 million.

U.S. officials now hope to have an Iraqi company finish the work.

The report from the UN assistance mission in Iraq's human rights office reported evidence of torture, unlawful detentions, the growth of sectarian militias and death squads, and a rise in "honour killings" of women. The increasing incidence of discovery of the bodies of women and teenage girls, shot in the chest rather than in the head, has been attributed to the establishment by both extremist Sunnis and Shias of secretive sharia committees, which locals say carry out killings.

In a separate development, Manfred Nowak, the UN's special investigator, said torture was "totally out of hand" and might even be worse now than under Saddam Hussein. "You have terrorist groups, you have the military, you have police, you have these militias. There are so many people who are abducted, seriously tortured and finally killed," he told reporters at the UN's Geneva headquarters.

The US military had initially claimed a dramatic drop in the Iraqi death toll for August, but the estimate was revised sharply upwards after it revealed that it had inexplicably left out figures for people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets and other mass attacks.

The latest fatality figures have been disclosed amid emerging criticism from Iraqi and US officials - quoted anonymously in the New York Times - of the prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's ability to prevent the country sliding into civil war.

The violence again has risen most sharply in Baghdad, despite a massive joint Iraqi government and US operation to "clear" no-go areas of fighters. The report raises serious new questions about the ability of US and Iraqi forces to bring peace to Baghdad, where the bulk of the violent deaths occur.

Critically, the report states that the country's government, set up in 2006, is "facing a generalised breakdown of law and order which presents a serious challenge to the institutions of Iraq".

According to the UN, which releases the figures every two months, violent civilian deaths in July reached an unprecedented high of 3,590 people, an average of more than 100 a day. The August toll was 3,009 people, the report said. In the previous period the UN had reported just under 6,000 deaths - 5,106 from Baghdad.

It added: "Bodies found at the Medico-legal Institute often bear signs of severe torture, including acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin, broken bones (back, hands and legs), missing eyes, missing teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails."

On other issues, the report said that about 300,000 people had been displaced in Iraq since the bombing of a shrine in Samara in February.

The potential for even more violent instability came as two senior aides to the radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Militia has been blamed for much of the sectarian killing, were detained early yesterday by US forces in the southern city of Najaf.

In the capital the violence continued. Insurgents killed six policemen and wounded two others when they attacked a police station in western Baghdad, while a car bomb killed two people and wounded eight in the capital's mainly Shia Hurriya district. Gunmen also killed three policemen after attacking their patrol in the city.

"We had information that a terrorist of considerable significance was hiding in Basra; as a result of that information we conducted an operation in an attempt to arrest him," Burbridge told The Associated Press by telephone from southern Iraq. "During the attempted arrest Omar Farouq was killed, which is regrettable because we wanted to arrest him."

He said he could not comment on whether it was the same man who led al Qaeda's Southeast Asia operations, citing British policy not allowing him to link an individual to a specific organization.

But a Basra police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons, said it was the same man, adding Farouq was known to be an expert in bomb making. The officer said Farouq was going by the name Mahmoud Ahmed while living in Basra, adding that he entered Iraq three months ago.

Earlier, Basra police Lt. Col. Kareem al-Zubaidi identified the man killed as Mahmoud Ahmed, saying he returned two weeks ago after reportedly fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan. There was no explanation for the differing accounts on the date of his arrival.

Neighbors told The AP that Farouq was a member of al Qaeda and had received training in camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The U.S. command had no immediate comment on the incident.

Farouq was one of four al Qaeda suspects who broke out of the prison in Bagram, the main U.S. base in Afghanistan, in July 2005.

It was an embarrassing incident for the U.S. military, and the Pentagon waited until November to confirm that the man had escaped. The delay in releasing his name upset Indonesia, which had arrested Farouq in 2002 and then turned him over to the United States -- which then shipped him to Afghanistan.

After escaping, the al Qaeda leader and the three others had managed to evade a massive manhunt. They later appeared in a video sent to the Dubai-based television station Al-Arabiya and boasted of their feat.

The British Ministry of Defense would not confirm specifics on Farouq, but did say the suspect killed "was closely linked to terrorist activity such as murders and kidnappings."

A comma as a metaphor perhaps? If so, for what? All that bloodshed as merely a comma-- a pause in a long sentence - leading to a hopeful phrase or conclusion? Comma, "and they all lived happily ever after"? Or maybe, comma, "and then we bombed Iran"?

Of course, one can think of other punctuation that might be apt, including "?" for the 140,000 Americans still deployed there, "!" for the cries of the gravely injured, and "$" for Haliburton and other contractors.

Or perhaps, as in the comics pages, when an angry character really wants to curse: "!@#%^&*()#*"

But I'd like to offer one more, the simple period, to replace the hopeful comma. Below you will find some 2,700 periods, each standing for an American life lost in Iraq. Space does not permit a full accounting of the Iraqis killed, or any of those damaged for life.

Currently, Army units deploy for about a year, then spend one year at their home base before going back to Iraq or Afghanistan. Under these rules, the number of troops was to drop to 100,000 by next year.

The report said the Army has met a request by Central Command head General John Abizaid for more forces in the rotation pool by delaying the departure of a Stryker armored vehicle brigade to Alaska and by calling in a fast-reaction brigade combat team from Kuwait.

But a longer-term solution may require the Army to look at adding more units to the rotation mix, according to The Times.

"It may accelerate the pace of deployments, or it may mean looking at calling up additional units," the paper quotes a Pentagon official as saying.

That option may become reality in November, when the Pentagon is expected to identify units that will go to Iraq next year, the report said.

The Marine Corps, which patrols restive Anbar Province west of Baghdad, rotates two expeditionary forces every seven months.

The increased demand for troops comes at a time when military analysts say it is nearly stressed to the breaking point, The Times said.

Non-deployed combat brigades are experiencing low readiness ratings due mostly to a lack of usable weapons and equipment, the paper noted.

The wear and tear in Iraq is ruining M1A1 tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, Humvee vehicles and other equipment at such a fast pace that the Army has neither the money nor the industrial base to replace them, according to The Times.

Kovco had just come off shift from one of the most psychologically traumatising tasks performed by Australian troops in Iraq. He was an elite sniper, protecting the convoys of light armoured vehicles that transport Australian military, political, diplomatic and intelligence officials around the war-torn capital.

Only three possibilities existed: Kovco committed suicide, he accidentally shot himself or he was killed by a fellow soldier. Each was politically disastrous for the government, threatening to trigger new concerns about the inhuman conditions faced by the soldiers sent to enforce the US-led occupation of Iraq, and to rekindle widespread opposition to the war.

Five months later, after weeks of contradictory testimony at the inquiry, it is clear that the government and the military brass have worked systematically to prevent the truth ever being known. When the inquiry ended its hearings last week, and its officers retired to write their report, a litany of unanswered questions remained.

* Virtually all the crime scene evidence in Baghdad was quickly destroyed, either willfully or accidentally, by military officers. Kovco's room, which had been splattered with blood, was cleaned out, despite pleas from civilian police to preserve the evidence. Kovco's clothes were destroyed, while those worn by his roommates were washed. Military police performed no forensic tests.

* The laptop computer Kovco was using at the time of his death was turned off and closed before military or civilian police could see it. No information has been released on any message that he had sent or received.

* The bunkroom in which Kovco died was tiny-roughly the size of a shipping container-and cramped. Kovco and two other soldiers were no more than an arm's length apart, yet both his roommates said they saw nothing.

* A military police investigator, Sergeant Stephen Hession, did not inspect the room for five days. In the meantime, soldiers, including possible suspects, had been in and out.

* Kovco's pistol was placed in the lid of a box that once held copy paper. Later, another soldier's DNA was found on the pistol.

* Military authorities gave pre-prepared interview statements to key witnesses, including the two roommates, presenting fabricated accounts of what had happened. Another soldier was handed what he called a "bullshit scenario" whereby Kovco shot himself accidentally after bumping his funny bone. The statements also falsely declared that the soldiers were well drilled in a "buddy system" to check that loaded weapons were not carried off duty.

* Morticians at the Kuwait morgue-where Kovco's body was confused with that of Bosnian carpenter, Jusco Sinanovic, 47-washed his body, possibly with ammonia, before dispatching it to Australia. His hands, which might have held traces of gunpowder, had not been bagged, as is standard civilian police practice in a shooting death. When the body finally arrived in Australia eight days after his death, a pathologist assigned to perform the autopsy found that it had been stored in mothballs, eradicating traces of evidence remaining on his body.

* Australian Defence Force (ADF) chief Angus Houston flatly contradicted Defence Minister Nelson's claim, issued to the media the day after Kovco died, that the military had informed him that Kovco had accidentally shot himself while cleaning his weapon. Air Chief Marshal Houston said he had repeatedly advised Nelson that it was unclear how Kovco died. Nelson admitted six days later, on April 27, that his initial claim was false, and then offered a bizarre new version of events, in which the gun apparently went off by itself.

* A ballistics expert, Detective Inspector Wayne Hoffman, manager of the Forensic Ballistics Investigation Section of the New South Wales Police, presented the inquiry with a dozen detailed reasons why he believed Kovco died from a self-inflicted wound. Yet, inquiry president Group Captain Warren Cook took the extraordinary step, on the final day of hearings, of ruling out the possibility of suicide, well before the inquiry's report was written. "Suicide doesn't come into our reasoning whatsoever," he announced.

The Bulletin, a magazine which boasts of senior sources in the military and the Howard government, pointed out this week that a finding of suicide would have been distressing for Kovco's family, but even more disturbing for the government. Suicide, it noted, "is not altogether uncommon among soldiers in-or immediately after-high-stress combat deployments. But it is rarely acknowledged. And the suicide of an Australian soldier (with all its implications for troop morale) in a conflict as contentious as the Iraq War, would be much harder to explain than a death in combat. Only murder would make for a more difficult scenario."

The Bulletin predicted that the military board would attribute the death to misadventure or an "act of God".

Members of Kovco's family bitterly accused the government and the military of a cover-up. In a statement to the inquiry, Kovco's brother Ben said: "Though we would like to believe otherwise, it is very difficult to move beyond the undesirable idea that the ADF and its representatives have gone out of their way to destroy as much evidence as possible in an attempt to protect the organisation and its personnel from any implication of wrongdoing."

Kovco's mother Judy told Australian Broadcasting Corporation's "The 7.30 Report": "Enduring this inquiry, I just find this is face saving for them, for the army. This is not about my son's death." Asked whether she thought a major cover-up had taken place, she said: "I certainly do, yes, without doubt. They've done it in the past [been complicit in a cover-up]."

Kovco's widow Shelley told the inquiry that high-ranking defence officials and Defence Minister Nelson applied pressure so that her husband's body would be rushed home in time for a PR stunt on Anzac Day [an official military commemoration day]. This, she said, had contributed to the bungled repatriation of his body.

She revealed that the military had still not given her many of Kovco's belongings, including his laptop, on which he was writing an email to her just before he died. She also told the inquiry it would not find anything because the military had done such a thorough job of removing the evidence.

Just before the inquiry closed, the ADF announced that it had asked Internet web sites to remove revealing photographs and video of Australian soldiers assigned to the same security duties in Baghdad as Kovco. The images showed individual soldiers waving pistols around-some directly at the camera-and fanning wads of money while chomping on cigars. One picture showed a man in Australian uniform pointing a gun at the neck of a kneeling man, dressed as an Arab. The background was adorned with pornographic photographs, pasted on what appeared to be a soldier's barracks bedroom wall. Other videos reportedly showed soldiers exposing themselves.

The images gave just an inkling of the brutalised and de-humanised outlook instilled in Australian troops engaged in neo-colonial operations such as the occupation of Iraq.

Defence chief Houston condemned the display of "cultural insensitivity, disregard for operational security and inappropriate handling of weapons", and said an investigation would be launched to identify and punish the culprits. But Prime Minister John Howard urged people not to "overreact" to the images and declared that no special inquiry was needed. "I think we have to understand that soldiers, particularly in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, work in very stressful environments. Soldiers through the ages have let off a bit of steam when they are working in stressful environments."

Such conduct is, undoubtedly, the inevitable byproduct of the stress produced by continuously policing a hostile population-with every approaching person increasingly seen as a potential suicide bomber. But it is also the result of the military and ideological conditioning carried out to prepare young soldiers to kill innocent civilians. An unnamed senior Australian military officer told the Bulletin that US and allied snipers "are the psychological value-adders of modern urban warfare and they are becoming critical to combat operations in Iraq".

Members of the ADF "security detachment" in Baghdad are known to have opened fire on innocent civilians at least twice since 2004. In November that year, two men were shot driving a car, and army chief General Peter Cosgrove immediately defended the killings. In June this year, Australian soldiers blasted the bodyguards of Iraq's Trade Minister, Abdel Falah al-Sudany, killing one and wounding three others. Weeks later, Houston said an ADF inquiry had exonerated the soldiers. "Our personnel acted in accordance with their rules of engagement," he insisted.

No doubt these incidents, both briefly reported and then dropped, are only the tip of the iceberg. Since the illegal US-led invasion, Baghdad has descended into a nightmarish quagmire of shootings and bombings, with daily deaths of demoralised coalition troops and scores of innocent Iraqi civilians alike.

On May 2, Jacob Kovco was given a highly-publicised funeral with full military honours, attended by Howard, Nelson and Houston. His silver casket was draped in the Australian flag and flanked by a 100-strong guard of honour. The conscious cover-up of his death underscores the utter hypocrisy of the official commemoration of his life.