Mad Social Scientist

Still hoping these are isolated incidents. Because if coarse, brutal behavior is widespread among our occupying forces, the Iraqi mission will doubtless end in bloodshed and failure:

The 56-year-old shopkeeper was too scared to give his name. Among his bolts of cloth and bottles of detergent, he talked about how this time last year his family's hopes were so high, but now they feared that things would just get worse.

The son of a Shiite father and a Sunni mother, he spoke of his two brothers who Saddam had executed as political prisoners, and then he gave his verdict on the occupation: "The invasion was a bad idea. Saddam was bad and Bush is bad - but we'd have Saddam back any day."

Sadeer, my driver in Baghdad, is leaning the same way.

When he arrived at the Palestine Hotel yesterday he was limping; the leg of his jeans was soaked in blood. The cut was small and we were able to bandage it, but George Bush had lost another Iraqi friend.

Sadeer, a 28-year-old Shiite, had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Americans and he takes his life in his hands by working for me. Iraqis are being executed just for being in the company of Westerners.

But his encounter with a bullying US soldier, who roughed him up as he came through the security cordon around the hotel, has pushed him into the nationalist Iraqi camp.

When the GI challenged him, Sadeer tried to explain in his limited English that he entered the hotel routinely. But he was barked at, shoved away and then belted on the foot with a rifle. He used to slow in traffic to greet the US troops. Now he has turned: "Americans bad for Iraq - too many problems."

Leaving the hotel on foot, we had to go through the same streets to get to his car. I tried to explain our movements to the officer in charge of a US tank unit, but we were greeted with a stream of invective.

As I thanked the officer for his civility and moved on, one of his men fell in beside me, mumbling. Asked to repeat himself, he exploded: "Don't you f---in' eyeball me."

Nodding to his officer and raising his weapon, he shrieked: "He has rank to lose. I don't. I'll take you out quick as a flash, motherf---er!"

Remember how the Iraqi army "melted away"?

By some estimates, as many as 25 per cent of the new Iraqi security forces, on which the US is depending to impose law and order after June 30, has quit or simply melted away.