While President Bush has proposed a surge in US troops to Iraq, and requested additional funding of $ 100 billion, violence and road-side bomb blasts have increased manifold in Iraq. As of May 14, 3400 US soldiers have lost their lives, and 34,180 were wounded in the fighting.

The Bush administration does not keep track of the number of Iraqi civilian deaths, and the Iraqi Health Ministry is shy about disclosing the figure. The death toll of Iraqis is reportedly in the hundreds of thousands. According to one statistics, more than 68868 Iraqi civilians were either killed by US and coalition forces or by Iraqi's themselves. Apart from this figure, about 2 billion Iraqis have taken shelter in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey.

One day after vetoing the supplemental spending bill, which attached conditions, President Bush met with congressional leaders on May 6 to begin negotiations, a measure to fund on-going operation in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush said: "Setting a deadline for withdrawal is setting a date for failure."

Since Democrats are not in a position to override the veto, they are contemplating some other options. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi declared: "The congress is not going to give a blank check to the president." One of contending presidential candidates, Democrat John Edwards, urged the Democratic leadership in the congress to stand firm, and avoid negotiations on Iraq.

According to Washington Post of May 07, Republicans have stood behind the president's increasingly unpopular war policies. House majority leader John Boehner said that members wanted to know how well the Iraq plan was working, and if it was not what plan B was.

In Iraq, the government's largest Sunni coalition threatened to withdraw its cabinet members, saying that Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, a Shiite, was protecting Shiite extremists. In a bid to prevent defection, Bush invited Iraq's Sunni vice-president, Tariq Al-Hashimi, to Washington recently.

This shows how independently the Iraqi government operates. Recently, retired general Barry Mc Caffrey pointed out that there is essentially not a single province in the country where the central government holds sway. Therefore, there is no justification in blaming the puppet Iraqi government, which has no control over the entire country.

While the debate is on the additional funding and withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, there is no word on the construction of four military bases there, on which billions of dollars were spent over the past four years. Taxpayers in the US have been contributing towards civil war in Iraq. As of now, the cost of the operations in Iraq stands at 456 billion dollars. Every taxpayer is contributing around 3,400 dollars for this civil war in Iraq.

It is not a war, it is an occupation. The reason for the occupation, and more sacrifices by the people of US to sustain the conflict, was not explained at any stage by the president or his administration. The neo-conservative motivation, from the very beginning of the war in Iraq, was the privatization of Iraqi oil in favour of the global oil corporations.

In this context, I would like to quote from a letter to the editor of The Examiner (May issue): "framing the Iraqi debacle as a "war" and as an "insurgency" is an attempt to legitimize the illegitimate. The Bush administration is pushing the puppet government in Iraq to enact the Iraq hydrocarbon law. The law would give control of Iraq's oil to global oil corporations. To end the occupation would spoil the administration's plan to privatize Iraq's oil."

That President Bush will not leave Iraq has been reflected in the opinion column of the Washington Post (May 9) by David Ignatius, who informed the readers that President Bush told Saudis that he would not withdraw from Iraq. There is reason to believe this. When President Bush was contemplating invading Iraq he discussed the matter with Prince Bandar bin Al-Sultan, Saudi Ambassador to the United States, before discussing with his own Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Prince Bandar, who served 22 years in US, is a friend of the Bush family, and is presently as advisor to the National Security Council of Royal Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The Bush administration claimed several successful projects in Iraq, but they turned out to be non-existent. In the words of Barry Lando, a columnist (former producer of CBS's 60 minutes program) of syndicated Agene global: "When other inspectors arrived to check out the claims from sampling of eight projects, they found that seven were no longer operating at all. And, more unfortunate, the inspectors reported that they were unable to take a truly random sampling because many of the projects were in areas too unsafe to visit."

President Bush, in his remarks to Associated General contractors, blamed Al-Quaida for ratcheting up the sectarian violence in Iraq, not the government of Maliki, who is Shitte. He is now counting on General David Petraeus, top military commander in Iraq, to win "the war" in Iraq.

On the other hand, Vice-President Dick Cheney who was on a trip to the Middle East countries very recently, to counter the impending influence of Iran in the region, has blamed Iran for creating the mess in Iraq. He warned Iran by saying: "we will stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats. We will disrupt attacks on our forces." While Cheney was making imaginary threats, the State Department was in the midst of preparing a meeting between senior US and Iranian officials in Baghdad.

This reflects the diametrically opposite approaches of the State department and the vice-president. The vice-president's rhetorical call resembles the past tactics of the US administration for showing Saddam Hussein as a pawn on the political chessboard to win the hearts of dictatorial and corrupt regimes in the Middle East.

The people in the United States have exhausted their energy listening to same song, time and again, on Iraq. The latest CBS-New York Times poll indicates that approval rating of the president has dropped to 24 percent. It may be noted that President Nixon's approval rating went down to 23 percent during the Watergate scandal, when he was forced to resign.

Mohammad Amjad Hossain, a former Bangladesh diplomat, writes from Virginia