John Nicholas, in the Nation (April 24, 2004):

History usually provides a roadmap for the present. Unfortunately, leaders fail to consult the map. That's certainly been the case as the 9/11 Commission has prepared to hear behind-closed-doors testimony from Vice President Dick Cheney and President George Bush at the same time.

Members of the commission and, for the most part, members of congress, have accepted the secret-testimony arrangement. But why?

Presidents have testified before investigatory committees before. And they have done so on comparable issues. Former US Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman reminds us that in 1974, amid the national firestorm that followed President Gerald Ford's pardon of former President Richard Nixon, Ford voluntarily appeared before a House subcommittee that was reviewing the pardon.

"The President came before the subcommittee, made an opening statement and was questioned by the House members. Although each of us had only five minutes, I was able to ask the President directly whether there had been a deal with Nixon about the pardon. The public could determine by Ford's demeanor and his words whether to believe his emphatic denial of any deal," recalls Holtzman, who as a young member of the House was a key player in the Judiciary Committee's investigation of the Watergate scandal.

"The fact that important questions could be posed directly to the President and the fact that the President was willing to face down his severest critics in public were healthy things for our country. And, not even the staunchest Republicans complained that the presidency was being demeaned."

By recalling the history, Holtzman reminds us that President Bush could, and should, simply appear before the 9/11 Commission. There is no Constitutional crisis here. There is no dangerous precedent that could be established. And there is no question of proportionality--certainly, the intensity of the demands for an explanation of the Nixon pardon can appropriately compared with those for an explanation of how the current administration responded to terrorist threats before and after the September 11, 2001 attacks. "As with the Nixon pardon, the events of 9/11 have caused huge national concern," explains Holtzman. "The victims' families--as well as millions of others--have asked why it happened and what if anything could have been done to avert the tragedy. These are simple, reasonable questions."

Frank Rich, in the NYT (April 18, 2004):

The most apt movie for this moment just may be David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia." Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton ambassador to the United Nations whose foreign service career began in Vietnam, said to me last week, "That's the image everyone I've talked to who saw the movie has in his head right now."

What Mr. Holbrooke is referring to is the story's mordant conclusion. The Arab revolt against the Ottoman empire, abetted by the heroic British liaison officer T. E. Lawrence and guerrilla tactics, has succeeded. The shotgun mandating of the modern state of Iraq, by the League of Nations in 1920, is just a few years away. But as the local leaders gather in an Arab council, a tentative exercise in self-government, there is nothing but squabbling, even as power outages and public-health outrages roil the populace. "I didn't come here to watch a tribal bloodbath," says Peter O'Toole, as Lawrence, earlier in the movie when first encountering the internecine warfare of the Arab leaders he admired. But the bloodbath continued — and now that we've ended Saddam's savage grip on Iraq, it has predictably picked up where it left off. Only Americans have usurped the British as the primary targets in the crossfire of an undying civil war.

It was last weekend, after I watched "Lawrence" again for the first time in years, that L. Paul Bremer was asked by Tim Russert to whom we would turn over the keys in Iraq on June 30, and gave his now immortal answer: "Well, that's a good question." We don't have a clue, and in part that's because we have no memory.

As the historian Niall Ferguson points out in his new book, "Colossus: The Price of America's Empire," President Bush's promise to Iraqis of "a peaceful and representative government" in place of Saddam's brutal regime was an uncanny, if unconscious, replay of what the British commander who occupied Baghdad in 1917 told the people of what was then still Mesopotamia. "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators," Gen. F. S. Maude said back then, expressing the desire that his forces would help the populace build their own governmental institutions.

Iraq did not, however, give birth to an indigenous form of self-government. The country was run instead by a Bremer-like civil commissioner, Sir Arnold Wilson, for three often violent years. He and his deputy, Mr. Ferguson writes, "drew up a scheme for a unitary Iraqi state with almost no local consultation, simply ignoring those who advised against yoking together Assyria and Babylonia, Sunni and Shia." Eventually a British-style constitutional monarchy was installed, leading to decades of tumult and coups. By the time the revolution of 1958 overthrew the monarchy, the Baath party and Saddam were lurking in the wings.

To revisit "Lawrence" and the history it dramatizes in embryo is to feel not only déjà vu but also a roaring anger at the American arrogance and ignorance that has led to the current nightmare. Condoleezza Rice's use of the word "historical" to describe the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential briefing on Osama bin Laden was not the only tipoff to her limited understanding of history. In the opening filibuster of her testimony, she invoked the Lusitania, Hitler's rise and Pearl Harbor as analogues of 9/11 — an asymmetrical comparison that blurs the distinctions between nations' acts of war and the stateless conspiracies of modern terrorists. Apparently the administration's understanding of British colonial history in the Middle East is no sharper. Though it might have been impossible to prevent the 9/11 attacks, it would have been possible to avoid what's happening in Iraq now had anyone heeded the past. However much the current crisis may be a function of a military bungle like Donald Rumsfeld's inadequate deployment of troops or the diplomatic failure to attract a proper coalition, it is above all else the product of cultural hubris.

David Carr, in the NYT (April 25, 2004):

...The current administration's squeamishness about photographs depicting the consequences of war has plenty of precedents in American history, but it stands in stark contrast to where war photography began.

In 1862, New Yorkers went to the gallery of Matthew Brady and saw, for the first time, the gory externalities of the Civil War. The dead were a persistent presence because of the limitations of the technology of the day. Daguerreotypes required subjects that remained still, and there is no subject more patient than the dead.

But by the beginning of World War I, as the mass reproduction and distribution of images became more commonplace, the political and military leadership began to understand that seeing lifeless American soldiers could have a corrosive effect on the country's will to fight, and photography was banned altogether. It was only two years into World War II when the federal government decided it was time to take the lens cover off the camera - albeit in controlled and thematically patriotic ways.

"Up until that time, Americans had been supporting the war on imagination alone," said Susan Moeller, a professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. "The photographs helped to make the rhetoric and the goals tangible. The military, in this instance, wanted the American public to be in the same war they were in."

By the time of the Vietnam conflict, all hell was breaking loose, often in front of the eyes of the viewing public. War's inherent savagery, its indifference to human suffering, entered the hearts and minds of Americans like a rocket-propelled grenade through graphic video and still pictures. The dissonance between those images and the rhetoric of the American leadership helped the public decide that what was initially sold as a global quest for freedom had become a trap with incalculable costs.

Sometimes, it is the juxtaposition of images that creates its own narrative. During the first Gulf war, President George H. W. Bush was photographed playing golf at a time when coffins were piling up at Dover. And horror and outrage created by the iconic pictures from the so-called Highway of Death, where Iraqis fleeing in retreat from Kuwait were immolated by American bombs and missiles, may have been one reason Saddam Hussein was not pursued into Baghdad. It was under the first President Bush that formal ceremonies for the returning bodies of soldiers were discontinued at Dover - and with that, cameras were banned as well. The reason given at the time was that the type and timing of ceremonies ought more rightly to be left to each soldier's individual family, but then - as now - those motives were widely questioned. Still, the same policy has now become the general rule at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

David Halbfinger, in the NYT (April 24, 2004):

When questions were raised last month about whether a 27-year-old John Kerry had attended a Kansas City meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War where the assassination of senators was discussed, the Kerry presidential campaign went into action.

It accepted the resignation of a campaign volunteer in Florida, Scott Camil, the member of the antiwar group who raised the idea in November 1971 of killing politicians who backed the war. The campaign pressed other veterans who were in Kansas City, Mo., 33 years ago to re-examine their hazy memories while assuring them that Mr. Kerry was sure he had not been there.

John Musgrave, a disabled ex-marine from Baldwin City, Kan., who told The Kansas City Star that Mr. Kerry was at the meeting, said he got a call from John Hurley, the Kerry campaign's veterans coordinator.

"He said, `I'd like you to refresh your memory,' " Mr. Musgrave, 55, recounted in an interview, confirming an account he had given to The New York Sun. "He said it twice. `And call that reporter back and say you were mistaken about John Kerry being there.' "

Such little-noticed moments in Mr. Kerry's past — including his decision at age 26 to meet the Vietcong emissaries to the Paris peace talks — are coming under new scrutiny now, as Mr. Kerry finally makes the presidential run that his comrades in arms, and in the antiwar movement, half-mockingly predicted decades ago.

In an interview about his antiwar activities, Mr. Kerry said that he knew nothing of attempts by his campaign to tinker with the past and that he disapproved. "People's memories are people's memories," he said, adding that he had no memory of the Kansas City meeting.

Mr. Hurley says he was merely asking Mr. Musgrave to be accurate, "because his memory was contrary to everything I was hearing."

Yet while Mr. Kerry is heavily accentuating his five months in combat in Vietnam, he rarely emphasizes his two years working against the war — though he first catapulted to fame 33 years ago this week when he electrified millions of viewers in asking the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "How do you ask a man to be last man to die for a mistake?"

And when Mr. Kerry appeared on "Meet the Press" last weekend, he disavowed his own remarks on the same program in April 1971, when he said he and thousands of other soldiers had committed "atrocities."

From its inception, Vietnam Veterans Against the War was a curiosity and an influential force in the Vietnam protest movement because of the novelty, and political potency, of antiwar demonstrators in uniform.

In the year and a half that Mr. Kerry belonged to the group, it was loosely structured and had its share of revolutionaries and provocateurs — including many secretly working for law enforcement — who pushed the writings of Chairman Mao and talked of tossing grenades, though they seldom did worse than toss bags of chicken droppings at the Pentagon....

Isolationists, Islamist extremists, and"intellectuals" -- and other types beginning with the letter"i," who will be left unnamed in the interest of civility -- have sneered at the awkward eloquence of President George W. Bush, embodied in his press conference on the evening of April 13.

"Awkward eloquence" is not an oxymoron, for those who express themselves with some difficulty, or when struggling with emotion, may yet speak more powerfully than those whose orations are brilliantly-crafted, and well-practiced. Moses, the prophet of freedom, was afflicted with a stammer, and the prophet Muhammad was an illiterate. Neither of them would have had a chance on most of today's television talk shows, yet they moved the world.

I did not sneer at the President's words. And I believe there are others who, like me, were moved, even to tears, by his statements:

"Freedom is not this country's gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom… We have an obligation to work toward a more free world."

The Chief Executive of these United States sought, at times haltingly, to explain to the American people that"it's important for us to spread freedom throughout the Middle East."

Not for many decades, for even a century, has an American statesman so simply and necessarily defined our place in world history. As I explained to my son, other admirable American leaders fought to defend our freedoms -- only rarely, and at great risk, did they commit our nation to the defense, nay, the extension of freedom far from our borders, in places where most of us would never set foot.

Harry Truman did so, when he sent General Douglas MacArthur to the relief of South Korea. What were the Koreans to us? And yet, the people of Western Europe held their breaths in horror, waiting to see if America would save the Koreans -- for if we did not, then Stalin, the most feral of all the 20th century monsters, would be emboldened to invade Western Europe. Revisionist historians may jeer at such an interpretation, yet I have interviewed an American naval attaché who described to me a young German woman rushing to embrace him in the streets of Bonn, when news of the Inchon landing came, saying,"you have saved us!" And I know from the history of the former Yugoslavia that Marshal Tito told his cabinet the same thing -- that MacArthur's daring action had prevented Stalin from marching into Yugoslavia, into Italy, into West Germany, and beyond.

John F. Kennedy promised the same expansion of the dominions of light, when he tried to assist the Cubans in liberating their brothers and sisters from Castro, and refused to back down from the challenge of Vietnam. But his projects failed, for reasons we all know, above all because of his untimely martyrdom.

Reagan succeeded in bringing down the Muscovite empire of evil because he understood that the Soviets were bluffers, that their power rested on the hesitation of their strongest opponents. Somewhere in his soul Reagan understood that history could not stand still, and that the bourgeois revolution, the engines of entrepreneurship, contract, accountability, and individual freedom in general, must inevitably conquer the whole planet.

Shall we shrink, now, from words like"revolution"? Perhaps it would be better not to frighten the amateur thinkers in the isolationist camp, the pretentious pygmies who, knowing little of our history, tell us America never stood for anything but protection of our own shores, our own borders, our own hearths. The Hebrewphobes among them will particularly take offense at the dread word that signifies nothing more than inevitable change in the affairs of humanity, a turning of the mighty wheel of destiny. But let us not give them too much to shriek about. Some of us, like my friend Christopher Hitchens, may smile devilishly when they pronounce the words"regime change," suggesting that it was always a euphemism, and that they were for it on the barricades of Barcelona in 1937 when Orwell stood up against Stalinism, as well as in the streets of Manila in 1986 when"people power" ended the dictatorship of Marcos, and in the Nicaraguan voting booths when the Sandinista usurpers were shoved aside in 1990.

Isolationist poseurs wish the American people to forget that we were once described by Louis Kossuth, the 19th century hero of Hungarian independence, who was liberated from Russian and Austrian aggression by a" coalition of the willing" -- made up of the U.S., Britain, France, and Turkey -- in these terms:

"I have to thank the people, Congress, and government of the United States for my liberation from captivity. Human tongue has no words to express the bliss which I felt, when I -- the downtrodden Hungary's wandering chief -- saw the glorious flag of the Stripes and Stars fluttering over my head -- when I first bowed before it with deep respect -- when I saw around me the gallant officers and the crew of the Mississippi frigate -- the most of them the worthiest representatives of true American principles, American greatness, American generosity -- and to think that it was not a mere chance which cast the Star-spangled Banner around me, but that it was your protecting will -- to know that the United States of America, conscious of their glorious calling, as well as of their power, declared, by this unparalleled act, to be resolved to become the protectors of human rights -- to see a powerful vessel of America coming to far Asia to break the chains by which the mightiest despots of Europe fettered the activity of an exiled Magyar, whose very name disturbed the proud security of their sleep -- to feel restored by such a protection, and, in such a way, to freedom, and by freedom to activity; you may be well aware of what I have felt, and still feel, at the remembrance of this proud moment of my life. Others spoke -- you acted; and I was free! You acted; and at this act of yours, tyrants trembled; humanity shouted out with joy; the downtrodden people of Magyars -- the downtrodden, but not broken -- raised their heads with resolution and with hope, and the brilliancy of your Stars was greeted by Europe's oppressed nations as the morning star of rising liberty."

But enough of concern with the whimpers of the unwilling. President George W. Bush has clearly seen in the Arab and Islamic world an equivalent, for him, of what the Soviet empire represented for Reagan -- a part of the world that must inevitably also share the benefits of capitalism, democracy, prosperity, and peace. As he said on April 13,"Free societies are hopeful societies. A hopeful society is one more likely to be able to deal with the frustrations of those who are willing to commit suicide in order to represent a false ideology. A free society is a society in which somebody is more likely to be able to make a living. A free society is a society in which someone is more likely to be able to raise their child in a comfortable environment and see to it that child gets an education."

These simple phrases were not scripted. They were spontaneous, in reply to questions from reporters. And they speak to the responsibility that was always our American mission, when heroes like Kossuth looked to us for hope, and when our leaders, exemplified above all by Abraham Lincoln, proclaimed"a new birth of freedom" to the globe.

The task President Bush has assumed is an immense one, and is not without risk. When Reagan called on Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, Sovietism was moribund. By contrast, the Wahhabi ideology of al-Qaeda, the brutalizing brainwashing that led to horrors like the mutilations of Americans in Fallujah, remains volatile.

But I have said before, and will write now, and will argue again, that President Bush has restored to the Republican party its rightful legacy as a party of liberation. Those who, in the President's words,"don't believe Iraq can be free; that if you're Muslim, or perhaps brown-skinned, you can't be self-governing or free," will be proven wrong.

The walls that separate the Muslim world from the planetary realm of light will crumble. Iraq will not be President Bush's Vietnam, but his Berlin Wall.

Let the isolationists and Islamists, the limping leftists and recusant racists, make of it what they will: democracy will be fully globalized.

And as our greatest poet, Walt Whitman, wrote after a war wrought by another Republican war president:

"--Then turn, and be not alarm'd, O Libertad--turn your undying face,
To where the future, greater than all the past,
Is swiftly, surely preparing for you.

William Choong, in the Straits Times (Singapore) (April 17, 2004):

A HEAVILY armed military force from a Western country takes down a Middle Eastern regime which threatens Western interests in the region. A widespread revolt breaks out. This forces the invader to hand back power to elements of the former regime.

Iraq? Obviously. But in describing the latest case of insurrection in the country, one could just as well be talking about Britain's Iraqi experience in the 1920s.

'What happened in Iraq in 1920 so closely resembles the events now that only a historical ignoramus can be surprised,' writes Mr Niall Ferguson, the author of Empire: The Rise And Demise Of The British World Order And The Lessons For Global Power.

The parallels are chilling.

During World War I, between 1914 and 1918, Britain overthrew an authoritarian regime in Baghdad. It then installed a political order that was respectful of British interests in the Persian Gulf.

In 1920, a widespread revolt ensued, comprising the country's three main ethic groups - Shi'ites, Sunni and even the Kurds. It led to thousands of British casualties.

By August that year, the desperate British commander even appealed to London for poison-gas shells - an option that Winston Churchill, then a secretary of state in the War Office, had also called for.

In the following years, Britain ceded control of the country to elites from the former regime - made up mostly of Sunnis and politicians not representative of the population.

This scenario led to the emergence of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, in the 1970s.

There is no reason - as yet - to believe that Washing- ton's experience in Iraq could see the United States venturing down the British road.

The latest insurgency led by radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr is estimated to command support from less than a tenth of Iraq's 25 million people.

But the intensification of the current insurrection suggests that the US is slowly being pushed the way of Britain in the 1920s.

'A light military force whose occupation of Iraq was becoming unpopular allowed armed groups to fight with great effectiveness,' said Iraq expert Toby Dodge of Britain's Warwick University.

'That caused Britain to leave before completing the job of state-building.

'It looks like this might happen to the US as well,' he told The Straits Times.

If the US does leave before it builds a broad-based government, the Iraq of today could indeed go the way of the Iraq of the 1920s.

Ironically, the unpopular 25-member Iraqi Governing Council - whose members are considered by many Iraqis to be US puppets - looks very much like Britain's unrepresentative regime of the 1920s.

'The British were forced to give up on building a solid state with popular support. They gave power to a clique of politicians who were totally unrepresentative of the population,' said Dr Dodge.

'This is what the Americans are doing today.'

To be fair, Washington has agreed to United Nations' recommendations that the council be scrapped in place of a more broad-based interim government before power is returned to Iraqis on June 30.

But with the rise of the insurgency and an American public that is cooling towards Iraq, a British-style disengagement is possible.

Writing three months before the US invasion of Iraq in March last year, British historian Charles Tripp warned of such an outcome.

A US disengagement would 'certainly cause despair among those Iraqis who have seen the US as their main hope of radical political change,' he wrote.

'But for the US, as for the British 80 years ago, the lower risk, the lesser cost and the short-term advantages may outweigh the possible future benefits of fundamental social transformation in Iraq.'

Joseph Persico, in the Montreal Gazette (April 19, 2004):

The U.S. president was receiving intelligence that an attack might occur imminently, probably not on the American mainland, but abroad.

Intercepted communications pointed to an adversary with a deadly history of surprise attacks. And, it did happen, the most horrific assault ever on U.S. territory, and one that would lead to war.

An investigation as to how so large a blow could have gone undetected was begun while the U.S. was still fighting the war.

One objective was to find out what the president knew about the threat, when did he know and what did he do to counter it?

The date in question, Dec. 7, 1941; the president, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Today, a commission is investigating another surprise strike against the U.S. while the earlier disaster still foments speculation and controversy 63 years later. Did Roosevelt, as conspiratorialists maintain, know that Japan was about to attack Pearl Harbor, and did he fail to head off the assault to bring the U.S. into the Second World War?

How could FDR not have known? For more than a year, U.S. cryptanalysts had been breaking a key Japanese code.

In the six months before Dec. 7, 239 messages between Tokyo and the Japanese Embassy in Washington had been deciphered.

Given the information in his possession, if asked if Japan was going to attack, Roosevelt would doubtless have answered yes. Indeed, the latest decrypted data reaching him on the eve of Pearl Harbor had prompted Roosevelt to conclude: "This means war."

But if asked if he knew where an attack would occur, he would have had to say no. The intercepts had suggested strikes against the Philippines, Thailand, Malaya and the Russian maritime provinces. But not one of the 239 messages or any intelligence source available to FDR mentioned Pearl Harbor.

The charge that Roosevelt, by failing to repel the attack, found a back door into war raises this question: which war? It was not a secret that Roosevelt wanted to join Britain in the fight against Nazi Germany and that he had essentially launched an undeclared naval war in the Atlantic. The president had told the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, however, that a fight against Japan would be "the wrong war in the wrong ocean at the wrong time."

Churchill added: "We certainly do not want an additional war." What is often overlooked is that to get into the war that he did want, FDR had to depend on Hitler. It was Germany that, four days after Pearl Harbor, declared war on the United States. Roosevelt had no motive for war against Japan.

Still, conspiracy theories suggest, for example, that radio signals had been intercepted from the Japanese task force bearing down on Pearl Harbor. Commanders of this force, with no reason to protect Roosevelt's place in history, deny they ever broke radio silence. An historian as distinguished as John Toland has written that he interviewed the Navy radioman who picked up such signals, a claim the radioman has denied.

Pearl Harbor was an intelligence failure of stunning magnitude. The tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, is equally so.

Whether in 1941 or 2001, the commander in chief must bear responsibility for intelligence debacles. To assign treasonous chicanery to FDR, however, is dead wrong.

Drew Brown, in the Montreal Gazette (April 18, 2004):

With fighting in Iraq now at its worst, the number of U.S. troops killed by enemy fire has reached the highest level since the Vietnam War.

The first half of April has been the bloodiest period so far for U.S. troops in Iraq. There were 87 deaths by hostile fire in the first 15 days of this month, more than in the opening two weeks of the "shock and awe" invasion, when 82 Americans were killed in action.

"This has been some pretty intense fighting," said David Segal, director of the University of Maryland's Centre for Research on Military Organization. "We're looking at what happened during the major battles of Vietnam."

The last time U.S. troops experienced a two-week loss such as this one in Iraq was October 1971, two years before U.S. ground involvement ended in Vietnam.

There are 135,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Nearly 700 American troops have died since the beginning of the war. As of Friday, 493 had been killed by hostile fire.

The Vietnam War started with a slower death rate. The United States had been involved in Vietnam for six years before total fatalities surpassed 500 in 1965, the year President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a massive buildup of forces. There were 20,000 troops in Vietnam by the end of 1964. There were more than 200,000 a year later.

By the end of 1966, U.S. combat deaths in Vietnam had reached 3,910. By 1968, the peak of U.S. involvement, there were more than 500,000 troops in the country. During the same two-week period of April that year, 752 U.S. soldiers died, according to a search of records kept by the National Archives.

U.S. officials say that comparisons with Vietnam are invalid and reject the idea that Iraq has become a quagmire.

But the two-front battle that U.S. troops have been waging against Sunni and Shiite insurgents for the past two weeks is the most widespread resistance U.S. forces have faced since the war in Iraq began.

Senior U.S. officials insist the current fighting is only a "spike" and not indicative of a widening war.

On Thursday, General Richard B. Myers, chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the current fighting as a "symptom of the success" U.S. forces are having in Iraq.

"The sole intent" of the insurgents is to stop Iraq's transition to self-governance and democracy, he said.

U.S. Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday that the death toll was worse than he had expected a year ago.

He also announced that more than 20,000 troops, mostly from the 1st Armored Division, would remain in Iraq for three more months to deal with the insurgency instead of coming home after a year of duty.

Those killed represent a wide range of military specialties. Truck drivers and clerks are getting killed just as often, if not more often, than infantrymen and other combat specialties. That's an indication of the kind of battlefield environment in Iraq.

"Even Vietnam was a more conventional war than this," said Charles Moskos, a sociologist with Northwestern University who specializes in military issues and worked as a correspondent in the Vietnam War. "Here in Iraq, there are no battle lines. It's all over."

The average age of a casualty in Vietnam was 20 years old. The average age of a casualty in Iraq is nearly 27. The youngest American soldier killed in Iraq was 18; the oldest was 55.

More than 12 per cent of those killed have come from the Army National Guard and Army Reserve, which helps explain why the average age of the dead is higher.

"Reserve components tend to be older," Moskos said.

In a sharp departure from previous wars, 18 women have been killed, 12 of them by hostile fire, including a civilian lawyer working for the Army.

Since Vietnam, there was one attack on U.S. forces that inflicted a higher death toll than anything experienced since: 241 servicemen were killed in Beirut in 1983 when a suicide bomber from the Islamic terrorist group Hezbollah drove a truck full of explosives into their barracks.

Many experts and historians cite that attack as the beginning of America's war with Islamic terrorists.