The Ugly American of Vietnam has become the Uglier American of Iraq. It is not the inhumanity of My Lai which defines the US today but the sadism of Abu Ghraib. But even this hideous version may not have reached its nadir.

The deaths, on the day the elections were held, drew an angry response from the Iraqi interim government which called for the troops to be put on trial if they were found to have used excessive force

Rather than face another tour of duty in Iraq, a Lexington soldier who won a purple heart after he was wounded by a roadside bomb has deserted to Canada.

A group of hardline officials known as “nuclear hawks” is being promoted in a shake-up of the Bush administration's arms control and non-proliferation teams, according to officials close to the administration.

Tomorrow night, like a boy in a bubble, George W. Bush will tell the world it was for "freedom." He will claim the Iraqi election as a stamp of legitimacy for his policy, and many people will affirm it as such. Even critics of the war will mute their objections in response to the image of millions of Iraqis going to polling places, as if that act undoes the Bush catastrophe.