The Bush administration departed from this traditional practice. Neither the president nor any of his senior members of the team such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or the Secretary of State Colin Powell attends the funeral ceremony of the deceased US personnel killed in Iraq.

President Bush and his senior members of his administration have fenced off themselves from funeral ceremonies and banned cameramen entering the central military morgue at Dover, in Delaware state where hundreds who died in Iraq were received. It is also difficult for the photographers to get past security at the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington, where thousands of the wounded in Iraq are being treated.

The question is: Why?

The American dead and the injured from Iraq are being ignored by the Bush administration so as to give the impression to the public in the US that nothing wrong has been happening in Iraq. The administration wants to claim that it is the US soldiers who are winning the game in Iraq and everything is going on as planned. Many consider that this behaviour of the administration is compared to that of "Comical Ali" of Iraq ( Information Minister Mohammad Saeed al-Sahaf) who assured reporters, even as US tanks rumbled in Baghdad, that: "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!"

One of the reasons for such callous regard for the dead soldiers appears to be that the Bush administration knows at its heart that Iraq war was unprovoked and illegal under international law. The war began with illogic: false intelligence used to bolster a false "imminent threat" to the US. The same illogic continues today: the more Americans die, the more it is a sign of US progress in Iraq.

The illogical conclusions led the administration to conclude that it is desirable not to meet the reality of war, the dead soldiers coming in bags to the US. It seems that they do not understand the political implications of sidetracking truth. As the columnist Maureen Dowd in the New York Times recently wrote: " No juxtaposition is too absurd to stop Bush officials from insisting nothing is wrong. Car bombs and a blitz of air-to-ground missiles turned Iraq into a hideous tangle of ambulances, stretchers and dead bodies, just after Paul Wolfowitz, arrived there to show-case success."

It is reported that some Republican commentators have begun to question the President's aloofness. But asked about the remarkable Presidential silence that greeted the death of 15-soldiers in the downing of a Chinook helicopter in Iraq early last month, Dan Barlett, the president's communications director, defended : "If a helicopter were hit an hour later, after he (the President) came out and spoke, should he come out again? The public wants the commander-in-chief to have a proper perspective and to keep his eye on the big picture and on the ball." This seems to be the classic statement of spin-doctors to protect the president.

Many political observers have commented on the Bush administration's ongoing war with the media. The administration is attacking them for using the term "resistance fighters" in Iraq and for not reporting "good news" out of Iraq. It is surprisingly noted that majority of print and electronic media have become subservient to the US administration in a country known for its objective and fair reporting.

No nation is more replete with patriotic imagery in word, in song and symbol than America. This is inherently nothing wrong. However patriotism is being fully exploited to advance the ideology of the administration. The more uncritical the kind of patriotism that rules popular imagination, the more insulated and different the American people feel. As Dr. Samuel Johnson famously noted in 1775, on the eve of the American Revolution, "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel."

After the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration has not only told the stories from its own perspective but also attempted to influence the rest of the world. However the Qatar-based Al Jazeera TV has come out boldly with real stories in Iraq. As Lewis Lapham, Editor of Harper's Magazine, put it in 1997: "I wonder how a society can long endure by defining truth as the acceptance of untruth, or by passing legislation incapable of being enforced, or by thinking that freedom is a trust fund inherited at birth and certain to a lifetime."

Commentators in the US have pointed out that while families and communities grieve about their losses in Iraq, the President storms the country with his hand out for tens of millions of dollars in donations for his forthcoming re-election campaign. But does he avoid photo-opportunity with the mothers of the dead from Iraq?

No wonder the public in the US is being disillusioned by the rhetoric of the Bush administration. For the first time since the opening attack on Baghdad on March 20, most Americans -- 51% -- reportedly disapprove of the president's handling of the war. In a Washington Post/ABC News opinion poll taken before the Chinook helicopter disaster, 87% of respondents said that they feared the US would be bogged down in Iraq and 62% regarded the death toll as unacceptable.

Meanwhile George Soros, one of the world's richest men, reportedly told the media that he had a new project in his hand: beating President George Bush. He said, "It is the central focus of my life and the presidential race in 2004 is a matter of life and death . . . America under Bush, is a danger to the world. I am willing to put my money where my mouth is."

With the passing of each week, the war touches thousands more American families in the most direct way. But the President moves on with rhetoric of "progress" in Iraq and the spin doctors within the administration seem to distance the President and the families of the dead from Iraq.

The Bush administration's change of heart to transfer power to Iraqis by the end of June next year is propelled by the fragile security situation and the mounting death toll in Iraq. During the Vietnam War it took two years from 1963 to end of 1964, for American combat deaths to reach 324. The US has surpassed that figure in Iraq in only seven months where at the time of writing 398 American servicemen died. The last exit strategy in Vietnam was Vietnamisation, training South Vietnamese to fight the North Vietnamese and guerrillas. Now the buzzword is Iraqisation.

Just as President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair began joint a press conference in London in November, the bombers hit the British targets in Istanbul with utter devastation and turned the conference into somber reality that their efforts to contain terrorism had miserably failed in attacking Iraq. Both of them perhaps realize that the two countries under their leaderships have been sucked into escalating cycle of violence.

The president's avoidance of attending funerals of the American dead soldiers brings to mind one story that during the Vietnam war when the then US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara was told : "Mr. Secretary, we have got serious problems here. You ought to know what they are." And McNamara replied: "I don't want to hear about your problems. I want to hear about progress." It seems that same story is repeated now in the case of American occupation in Iraq.

Barrister Harun ur Rashid is a former Bangladesh Ambassador to the UN, Geneva.