Seven U.S. soldiers were killed when a massive roadside bomb exploded under an armored vehicle in Baghdad and two Marines were killed in Anbar province on Thursday, the military said. It was the deadliest day for U.S. forces in Iraq since a suicide bomber struck a mess hall Dec. 21.

The recent acts of terrorism, such as the bombing of the U.N. headquarters and the mosque in Najaf, show a couple of things. First, that Iraq is still a dangerous place. They also show, I think, the desperation -- the desperation of the adversaries that we face. We're actively engaged in rooting out this threat with more and more Iraqis coming forward with information and a willingness to help us.

-- Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, September 9, 003.

he Pentagon is sending a retired four-star Army general to Iraq next week to conduct an unusual "open-ended" review of the military's entire Iraq policy, including troop levels, training programs for Iraqi security forces and the strategy for fighting the insurgency, senior Defense Department officials said Thursday.

The election scheduled this month in Iraq could further inflame the country's conflict and increase the risk of civil war, Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to President Bush's father, said at a forum Thursday.

Rather than leading to stability, Scowcroft said, he feared that the election would further alienate Iraq's Sunni Muslim population and that it had "a great potential for deepening the conflict."

"Indeed, we may be seeing an incipient civil war [in Iraq] at the present time."

The Army is likely to make a temporary 30,000 increase in troop numbers permanent as it struggles to ease the burden on forces strained by the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a senior Army general said Thursday.