"We have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information . . . Things have been far worse than we have been told, our information more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster." THE man who spoke these words, T.F. Lawrence, the famed Lawrence of Arabia, is long dead. But were he still alive, he would most likely shake his head in disbelief to once again see his country, Great Britain, engaged and enmeshed in the very same treacherous area that was once called Mesopotamia — now known as Iraq.In 1920 Britain was fighting a large-scale Shiite insurgency in the newly-created country of Iraq carved out of the old Ottoman Empire's Mesopotamian provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra. Britain suffered more than 2,000 casualties in a war that gave rise to a chorus of protest by the British people.

The words of Lawrence were prophetic.

"We say we are in Mesopotamia to develop it for the benefit of the world . . . how long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of imperial troops and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administration."

In the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, new revelations about US troops massacring Iraqi civilians in the farming town of Haditha and the recent suicide of three detainees at the American detention centre at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (events that the Bush Administration's spin doctors either regretfully refer to as "acts of war" or contemptuously dismiss as acts of propaganda), it seems that leaders and nations do not learn from history.

When these events became known, the White House claimed that they resulted from the actions of a handful of misguided individuals. It was claimed that the values of a democratic society would not sanction such actions.

But history tells another truth. In 1969 in another conflict, American troops were involved in another land far from the American homeland, fighting the Vietnam war. In that conflict too, which initially enjoyed a high level of public support, American confidence in its Indo-Chinese military adventure began to plunge when victory remained entirely elusive.

In the Vietnamese village of My Lai, 347 South Vietnamese civilians became victims of America's weariness of fighting a war against a strange people and against an enemy who inflicted casualties while remaining largely unseen.

There, too, troops lashed out, just as they did in the recent Haditha killings. There too it was mostly women and children who died. And here also it will be the soldiers who will be punished, not the generals and not the political leaders who sent them to Iraq to fight an unwinnable war.

Recently the insurgent terrorist leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi (pictured) was killed by American bombs. It was true that he carried out his war against America and her allies in Iraq in a brutal manner. He has the blood of many innocent Iraqis on his hands and carried out many brutal acts that did not spare women or children.

At the news of his death there was much rejoicing among the political leaders in the capitals of those he was at war with. There was even rejoicing among certain sectors of the Iraqi people, particularly among the majority Shiite population who were often among the victims of the bombings, beheadings and shootings on the orders of al Zarqawi (but one suspects that any such rejoicing is muted among the Sunni Muslim population, the minority religious grouping which is engaged in what amounts to an internal Muslim civil war now being waged in Iraq; the Jordanian born al Zarqawi was their unofficial ally).

But regardless of whether or not you consider al Zarqawi's death to be justified America's use of TV images of his dead body has further inflamed anti-US opinion in the region, even among America's Arab allies.

It was said photos and film footage of his corpse were released to the media to show the world that al Zarqawi indeed was dead, just as the US-led alliance did when the two sons of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein were killed following a firefight with American troops. BUT<$> the use of dead bodies for what amount to propaganda purposes smacks of a certain barbarity seen in ancient times in ancient wars and conflicts and belie any talk of a moral "superiority" of one civilisation over another or the supposed sense of morality of one people over another.And there is yet another aspect of recent events in Iraq to consider. While there is no criticism coming from the media of the Western democracies over the use of dead bodies in this way, there was much outrage when dead American and British soldiers were put on public display as we saw in Somalia in the now infamous incident that led to the book and movie about the brief US intervention in that country, Black Hawk Down.

The spectacle of dead American soldiers being dragged down the street behind a Jeep caused huge outrage in the West — as did the sight of dead Americans hanging from poles in Iraq. If you lower your standards, calling Prisoners of War "enemy combatants" and denying them rights guaranteed under the Geneva Convention, if you kidnap civilians and ship them to countries where you may torture information out of them (calling the process "rendition"), then you must expect to keep losing hearts and minds in a country. WHEN I looked up rendition in the dictionary I could not find any definition remotely meaning the movement of people from one country to another so that you may interrogate them. "Rendition" has to do with the interpretation or performance of a piece of music or drama — not state-sponsored exercises in melodrama. But then the use of the term "collateral damage" is now in common use, although how this appalling euphemism came to be used to describe the deaths of innocent civilians in warfare is beyond me.

World War Two is still called the "Good War". It was. Between 1939 and 1945 the differences between good and evil, right and wrong, were quite clear.

The same cannot be said of America's current war on terror. There's no disputing the fact this war began on September 11, 2001 when Arab terrorists attacked New York and Washington with civilian jetliners.

But America has responded to these barbaric actions with strategies and tactics that are equally questionable. One must conclude that a line has been crossed by combatants on both sides of this undeclared war and I fear we will all have cause to regret the "collateral damage", if you will, that is being inflicted on international principles and international standards of behaviour.