It has not been a good couple of weeks for America and its Iraq policy.

Its likely to get worse if those photographs of gang rapes, supposedly of Iraqi women by American troops, are indeed genuine. And given the remarks of Mr Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, it seems that they are. Mr Rumsfeld, in his testimony before Congress last week, had warned that additional, and even more offensive, pictures - some already in the public domain - were likely to emerge.

Add this public relations disaster to the crises the Americans face at Fallujah and Najaf and the mounting loss of US troops across Iraq, and President Bush and his administration would hardly be surprised if there are many people lined up to say "I told you so" about their Iraqi enterprise and the doctrines of pre-emptive strike and regime change.

The ideological basis of the war was flawed. It was compounded by the decision of the Anglo-American consortium to snub the United Nations in the face of the unease of the international community over an attack on Saddam Hussein.

The relatively quick collapse of Saddam's regime in the face of the "shock and awe" of US military might and technological superiority may have lulled the Americans into believing that pacifying Iraq would be easy business. It has not turned out to be so. The Americans are facing a nasty urban guerilla war waged by some people who may have hated Saddam but do not want US troops in their country.

It is this miscalculation, we believe, that set the basis for the atrocities committed by US troops against Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. The dehumanising of the detainees may not be official policy and might not have been ordered by senior officers - although questions have been raised in this regard - but the context of the war created the environment for this mistreatment.

There is little doubt, it seems, that the US military in Iraq operates in an atmosphere of deep fear. No one knows who is the enemy; when the next mortar will hit a hotel or military base; or when the next roadside bomb will blow a convoy to smithereens.

Moreover, the administration's strategy for justifying the war contributed to the environment that has been created in Iraq and the context within which the soldiers operate. The Iraq project, ultimately, was made to transcend Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction to envelope this broad 'war on terrorism'. In this war, unfortunately, Arab and Islam have, for the kid from Idaho, become synonyms for terror. In the absence of the WMDs, Saddam and bin Laden have largely become indistinguishable.

The images from Abu Ghraib have done what the reports of the mounting casualties in Iraq, military and civilian, have so far failed to do: galvanise people opposed to America's Iraq policy. The reason is that these images undermine the moral high ground that Americans often seek to stake out for themselves.

Which causes us to wonder why the US leadership was not more aggressive in dealing with the issue when it was first known there was a problem at Abu Ghraib, but no pictures were in the public domain. It seems to us that Mr Rumsfeld, and perhaps even the president, displayed a grave lack of curiosity when the initial allegations surfaced.

Both Mr Bush and Mr Rumsfeld have now apologised for the behaviour of what they say is a minority of soldiers. We take their sincerity at face value.

We believe that this fiasco can now be purveyed into a positive. It is an opportunity for the United States to do what it might have done at the outset - genuinely embrace the international community with a broad UN mandate on Iraq.
In the process America must also change tact on the Israeli/Palestinian question and become more even-handed. It may demand swallowing some pride, but the United States is usually willing to do what is right.

The fear factor

Feeding the multitude

DANGEROUS PETS