IRAQ - The Neo-Baathists & US Electioneering.

Critics say that, if Allawi is a neo-Baathist, he may have a reason to weaken Bush's chances of getting re-elected on Nov. 2. The rival candidate, John Kerry, has given Baghdadis a perception that as president he could end the US presence in this country sooner than a Republican leader would do. This may explain why Allawi blamed the US-led forces on Oct. 26 for insurgents' massacre of 49 freshly trained Iraqi National Guard recruits, saying the US military had shown "major negligence". By doing that, he gave Kerry ammunition to attack Bush.

The assault, the deadliest of the guerrilla war, took place at night on Oct. 23 in remote eastern Iraq, as three buses of unarmed guardsmen were heading south for their leave. Guerrillas of Zarqawi's group dressed as policemen waylaid the travellers at a fake checkpoint, killed all 49 soldiers and their three civilian drivers, mostly with shots to their heads, and burned the buses.

(The relentless assaults on Iraqi security forces continued, as a Sunni militant group called the Army of Ansar Al-Sunna posted Internet photos showing that it had captured 11 Iraqi guardsmen. Later the group showed how it killed them).

Another issue damaging to Bush came up on Oct. 25, when the IAEA told the UN Security Council that 380 tonnes of high explosives in Iraq went missing. US officials later said the explosives may have been smuggled to Russia, through Syria, shortly before the US-led invasion caused Saddam's regime to collapse on April 9, 2003. "It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site [Al-Qa'qa' south of Baghdad] before the regime's fall", said Mohammed Al-Shara', a neo-Baathist who heads the Science Ministry's site monitoring department and who previously worked with UN weapons inspectors under Saddam's regime. Shara' added: "The officials that were inside this facility (Qa'qa') beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the [the regime's] fall and I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of". Shara' warned that other nearby sites with similar materials could have also been plundered.

At a rally in Toledo on Oct. 28, Kerry said: "The president was warned that those explosives were there - warned by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Today, the president's own former chief weapons inspector says it's likely these explosives are being used against our troops". He added: "This president believes the buck stops everywhere but with the president of the United States".

Indeed, within minutes of Bush's Oct. 27 comments, it seemed the president had been lured into precisely the conversation the Kerry campaign was seeking. As if well prepared, the press was immediately bombarded with a stream of e-mails from Kerry's surrogates savaging Bush for his comments. Democratic staff and supporters were sent to cable news networks and radio stations.

The Bush camp responded with its own surrogate on Oct. 28, sending former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani on to the morning TV and radio shows. But he provided the Democrats with fresh fodder: "No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?", Giuliani said on NBC. The Democrats blasted the Bush camp for laying blame on US troops in harm's way.

Kerry again pounded away on Oct. 29 on the explosives issue while Bush tried to move to other topics, saying Kerry showed a "complete disregard for the facts" and would "say anything to get elected". While Kerry mentioned the explosives repeatedly, his aides issued statements contending that the administration was trying to duck the blame for failing to secure the Qa'qa' arms depot. "Mr. President", Kerry said, "it's long since time for you to start taking responsibility for the mistakes you made".

Kerry portrayed the missing explosives as the latest piece of evidence that the Iraq war made Americans less safe, not more so, as Bush often insisted. With a military investigation under way, a Minneapolis affiliate of ABC-TV broadcast film it said was taken on April 18, 2003, nine days after US troops reached Baghdad, showing scores of crates inside an Iraqi bunker that it said were marked "explosive". The station, KSTP, said the film was shot by a crew embedded with a unit of the 101st Airborne Division. An anchor said KSTP had determined with global positioning system technology, and by talking to members of the unit, that the crew and its military escort on that day headed from a point a short distance south of the Qa'qa' arms depot and made a brief trip north. That would have placed them in or very near the facility. Some of the crates shown in the film were stamped with the words "Al-Qaqaa State Establishment" in English; others bear orange stickers marked "Eksplosiv - Explosive". The station said members of the 101st showed the news crew "bunker after bunker of material labelled "explosives". It reported that entry was gained with "the snap of a bolt cutter" to a chain, and that the bunkers were not secured thereafter. A reporter and photographer said that Iraqis were "coming and going freely" in the area.

The issue proved nettlesome for the Bush camp, which has said the disappearance was being investigated and that there was no proof the explosives had been used against coalition troops. On Oct. 28, Kerry aides sent out a transcript and later a video of Giuliani suggesting that the fault might lie with the first US troops to reach the depot, not the president. Sen. John Edwards, Kerry's running mate, said it was wrong to blame the troops. "Our men and women in uniform did their job", he said, adding: "George Bush didn't do his job". In Ohio Kerry reminded an audience of Bush's comment that Americans should not want a commander-in-chief who "jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts". He then added, "Well, Mr. President, I agree with you"; he listed times when he said Bush had done exactly that.

In August, it was Kerry who was drawn out of a prolonged and damaging silence and forced to confront slurs about his military record made by the Republican-sponsored Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Their claims, which the media amplified, reversed the momentum Kerry had built up. But even when he addressed the smears, some Democrats fretted that he had only drawn greater attention to the issue. With the explosives, the press is once again in the middle.

Whatever the details, deadly weapons are missing and could have gone to the terrorists. This serves Kerry's case that Bush's war in Iraq has made the world less safe. Kerry said on Oct. 28: "Here's the bottom line on the missing explosives in Iraq: They're not where they're supposed to be. You were warned to guard them. You didn't guard them".

Over 100,000 Iraqi Civilians Killed Since March 20, 03: On Oct. 29, the International Herald Tribune (IHT) quoted a new US study as saying more than 100,000 civilians had probably died in Iraq as direct or indirect consequences of the March 20, 2003, US-led invasion. The study was made by a research team at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. The report was scheduled for publication on the Internet on Oct. 29 by The Lancet, the English medical journal.

The figure is far higher than previous mortality estimates. The IHT said: "Editors of the journal decided not to wait for Lancet's normal publication date in early November, but instead to place the research online on Oct. 29, apparently so it could circulate before the US presidential election". This also shows the extent to which the American society has become polarised, with Democrats and Republicans fighting tooth and nail to win the presidency.

The finding will generate intense controversy, not only in the US but across the globe, since the Bush administration has not estimated civilian casualties from the conflict. Independent groups have put the number at most in the tens of thousands.

In the study, according to the IHT, teams of researchers fanned out across Iraq in mid-September to interview nearly 1,000 families in 33 previously selected locations. Families were interviewed about births and deaths in the household before and after the invasion.

The IHT article added: "Although the paper's authors acknowledge that thorough data collection was difficult in what is effectively still a war zone, the data they managed to collect are extensive: Iraqis were 2.5 times more likely to die in the 17 months following the invasion than in the 14 months before it".

Before the invasion, the study says, the most common causes of death in Iraq were heart attacks, strokes and chronic diseases. "Afterward, violent death was far ahead of all other causes".

The IHT quoted Dr. Gilbert Burnham of the Johns Hopkins study team as saying: "We were shocked at the magnitude but we're quite sure that the estimate of 100,000 is a conservative estimate". He said the team excluded deaths in Falluja in making their estimate, since that city was the site of unusually intense violence.

In 15 of the 33 communities visited, residents reported violent deaths in the family since the conflict started. They attributed many of those deaths to attacks by coalition forces mostly air strikes and most of those killed were women and children. The risk of violent death was 58 times higher than before the war, the researchers reported. "The fact that more than half of the deaths caused by the occupation forces were women and children is a cause for concern", the authors wrote.

The team, led by Dr. Les Roberts, included researchers from the Johns Hopkins Centre for International Emergency, Disaster and Refugee Studies as well as doctors from Al-Mustansiriya University Medical School in Baghdad. The IHT article added: "There is bound to be skepticism about the estimate of 100,000 excess deaths, which translates into an average of 166 excess deaths a day since the invasion. But some were not surprised".

The IHT quoted Scott Lipscomb, an associate professor at Northwestern University, as saying: "I am emotionally shocked, but I have no trouble in believing that this many people have been killed". Lipscomb works on a Website called www.iraqbodycount.net. That project, which collates only media-reported deaths, currently put the maximum death toll at just under 17,000. "We've always maintained that the actual count must be much higher", Lipscomb said, according to the IHT.

The IHT article added: "The Lancet researchers were highly technical in their selection of interview sites and data analysis, although interview locations were limited somewhat by the researchers' decision to cut down driving time when statistically possible to minimize risk to the interviewers".

Although the teams relied primarily on interviews with local residents, the IHT said, "they also requested to see at least two death certificates at the end of interviews in each area, to try to ensure that people had remembered and responded honestly". The research team "decided that asking for death certificates in each case, during the interviews, might cause hostility and could put the research team in danger".

Some of those killed may have been insurgents, not true civilians, the authors noted. Also, the rise in mortality included a rise in murders and some deaths attributable to the deterioration of medical care. "But the majority of excess mortality is clearly due to violence", Burnham said, according to the IHT.

The paper is "studied and scientific, reserving judgment on the politics of the Iraq conflict". But in an accompanying editorial, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, is "acerbic and to the point about its message". The paper was received in October, "but it was peer-reviewed and edited at top speed because of its political importance".

"From a purely public health perspective it is clear that whatever planning did take place was grievously in error", Horton wrote, adding: "The invasion of Iraq, the displacement of a cruel dictator and the attempt to impose a liberal democracy by force have, by themselves, been insufficient to bring peace and security to the civilian population".

The IHT quoted Horton as adding: "Democratic imperialism has led to more deaths, not fewer".

In their paper, the IHT noted, "Roberts and his colleagues are extremely critical of the Bush administration and the US Army for not releasing estimates of civilian deaths".

The IHT quoted the authors as saying in their paper: "This study shows that with moderate funds, 4 weeks, and 7 Iraqi team members willing to risk their lives, a useful measure of civilian deaths could be obtained".