Bush vows to persevere in Iraq despite 'horrific attacks'

1.00pm - By RUPERT CORNWELL

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has vowed to stay the course in Iraq despite yesterday's "horrific attacks" in Fallujah that ended with jubilant Iraqis dragging the charred bodies of Americans through the streets.

Until yesterday, Washington's explanation of the continuing high level of violence in Iraq was straight-forward: now that the military was making itself harder to hit, the insurgents were switching to 'soft targets' - Iraqis who cooperated with the coalition occupiers, and foreign contractors and other civilian workers.

Yesterday's bloody events however comprehensively disproved that theory.

Five US soldiers were killed when their M-113 armoured personnel carrier ran over a bomb in the countryside close to the flashpoint city of Fallujah.

In Fallujah itself, US cable channels repeatedly showed heavily edited images of the burning shells of two SUVs, in which the four foreign contractors, at least three of them Americans and another a woman, were ambushed. What was not shown was footage of charred corpses being mutilated, dragged through the streets and hanged from a bridge in front of a revelling crowd of Iraqis.

The scenes inevitably kindled memories of Mogadishu in 1993, when a mob killed US soldiers and hauled their bodies through the streets - so dismaying and unnerving the public here that the new Clinton administration shortly afterwards withdrew US peacekeeping forces from Somalia.

Given President Bush's repeated insistence that the coalition will 'stay the course' in Iraq until security and order are established, and his determination to show he is 'tougher' than his predecessor, no such pull-back is likely now.

"We will not turn back from our effort," Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman told reporters, blaming the atrocity on supporters of Saddam Hussein and others, who were "doing everything they can" to try to prevent the transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government, scheduled for June 30.

"There are terrorists, there are some remnants of the former regime that are enemies of freedom and enemies of democracy, but democracy is taking root," Mr McClellan said added. "We are making important progress."

Nonetheless, gruesome photos from Fallujah were proof that Iraq, or parts of it at least, remains an extremely dangerous place where foreign soldiers and contractors alike venture at their peril - exactly the message, of course, that the insurgents intended to send.

Though more 'routine,' the deaths of the five soldiers are a separate reminder that US forces in Iraq are suffering losses on an almost daily basis.

In the 335 days since President Bush proclaimed an end to "major combat operations" on May 1 2003, 461 US servicemen have died, almost four times as many during the six-week-long war proper, and at least 3,000 have been wounded. So commonplace have the ambushes and attacks become that they rarely make newspaper front pages or the nightly news bulletins.

But even on its own, the killing of the five soldiers from the First Infantry Division near Fallujah would have made yesterday one of the bloodiest days yet for the US military, with a death toll exceeded only when troop helicopters have been shot down or crashed.

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq