"We?re going to raise the Iraqi flag over Falluja and give it back to the Fallujans," Major-General Richard Natonski told the First Marine Division at the start of the battle for the western Iraqi city. After six days of one-sided fighting (38 American soldiers killed, and about 1,200 Iraqi resistance fighters), what?s left of the city has indeed been captured, but most Fallujans left weeks ago. So did most of the resistance fighters who were making it their base.

Even as Falluja was being reduced to ruins, rebels were seizing the centre of Mosul, Iraq?s third-largest city, and a third of the US blocking force around Falluja had to be sent north to deal with it. Car-bombs blew up in Baghdad, mortar rounds landed in the Green Zone, and there was heavy fighting in the town of Yusufiyah south of the capital. It?s like the fairground game of Whack-a-Mole: bash down one mole and up pops another elsewhere. And the US has just not got enough troops in Iraq to whack all the centres of the resistance at once.

This was the main issue from the start for the US Army, which was deeply opposed to the invasion plan that Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld foisted on the professional soldiers. As Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki (forced into retirement by Rumsfeld) told a Senate committee in February of last year, a force "on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would be needed to control Iraq after the war. Rumsfeld retorted publicly that Shinseki?s figure was "far from the mark," and his neo-conservative ally, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, said: "It?s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself...." But that?s exactly what the professional soldiers did foresee.

Anybody could have invaded Iraq. With a little help on sealift and air support, Belgium could have done it. Only the toadies in the upper ranks of Western intelligence services managed to persuade themselves that Iraq had functioning "weapons of mass destruction;" working-level analysts overwhelmingly doubted it. The problem wasn?t the war; it was the occupation.

If there had been 300,000 US troops in Iraq when the war ended, the orgy of looting, the collapse of public order and public services, and all the consequent crime and privation that alienated the Iraqi public might have been averted. The US armed forces could have come up with that many soldiers for a year -- and if order had been maintained in Iraq and elections had been held there a year ago, it would all have been over by now. But on Rumsfeld?s insistence, there were only 138,000 US troops in Iraq.

The resistance has grown so widespread that it would take half a million American soldiers to win at this game of Whack-a-Mole and install an Iraqi government that would last long enough for the US to walk away from the country without humiliation. The security situation is now far worse, and even deputy prime minister Barham Salih of the US-appointed interim government admits that the promised January elections may have to be postponed.