Recently, Iraqi guerillas have been killing US troops at the rate of about two a day. Even if the fighting does not escalate any further, at least 1,000 more American troops will die in Iraq before the election in Novem-ber, 2004. Welcome to Iraq-Nam.

George W. Bush still insists that the Iraqi resistance is just "a few remaining hold-outs" from the defunct regime because he needs this to be true. Otherwise, his invasion of Iraq would have been a dreadful mistake. At least in public, the US army in Iraq agrees: "Mid-level Baathists, Iraqi intelligence service, Special Security Organisation people, Special Republican Guards... conducting a classical guerilla-type campaign against us," said US General John Abizaid two weeks ago.

However, the videos claiming responsibility for the attacks that are delivered almost daily to Arabic-language satellite TV channels attest that most of them actually come from radical Islamists within the Sunni Arab population. These are the religious extremists who were suppressed by resolutely secular Baath Party: Salafists and other radicals who long for a 'pure' Iraq purged of corrupting non-Islamic influences. Now they are free to act, and their first goal is to purify Iraq of American occupation troops.

A tipping point of sorts has been passed: there is now a serious guerilla war in Iraq, even if the US command is still unclear about the nature of its opponents. It will get far worse if religious extremists and nationalists among the Shia Arab majority begin attacking the occupation forces, but it is already affecting many calculations about the near-term future.

This implies that Washington's strenuous efforts to get other countries to send troops to Iraq in order to help American forces will almost all fail, because nobody wants to send their men into a meat-grinder. Japan has agreed to send a (probably token) number of troops to Iraq after a bruising parliamentary debate, and Turkey may yet send a division just to have troops in place in case Iraq breaks up entirely when the US finally pulls out, but that's about it.

El Salvador, Ukraine and a few other governments that desperately want to ingratiate themselves with Washington will send modest numbers of troops, but that will not even be enough to make up for the British troops that have been quietly withdrawn from Iraq since April. (Blair may be a true believer, but the British general staff aren't fools.) This will be an American war, just like Vietnam was.

It will escalate, and by this time next year the Bush re-election bid will be in serious trouble?so serious only another brief and victorious war against alleged 'terrorists' may be able to save it. Washington is already blaming 'foreign terrorists' for the non-Baathist resistance in Iraq, and Syria and Iran are going to fill the same rhetorical role that the Ho Chi Minh trail did in the past. Since Syria is a much softer target than Iran, it is quite likely to be invaded and occupied by American forces before November, 2004.

If there is another major terrorist attack on American soil, that likelihood becomes a near certainty. Bush probably will be re-elected next year, only to go under a couple of years later as military and economic troubles overwhelm his second administration. That would leave radical Islamists in power in Iraq (or at least in the Arabic-speaking parts of Iraq, if the country breaks up in the process). If the US has also invaded Syria in the meantime, the eventual pull-out would bring the same sort of people to power in Damascus?and in such a general retreat American troops would be pulled out of Afghanistan too, allowing the Taliban back into power.

The result, by around 2006-07, would be a solid bloc of radical Islamist states from the western borders of Pakistan to the eastern borders of Israel. But don?t worry: Paul Bremer, the US proconsul in Iraq, has it under control. "We are going to fight them and impose our will on them and we will capture or... kill them until we have imposed law and order on this country. We dominate the scene and we will continue to impose our will on this country." General Westmoreland could not have put it better.

Gwynne Dyer