It wasn't what I'd expected. Three years ago in Iraq I watched the American troops entering the border town of Safwan. And what I saw, and now understand, was an omen of the tragedy to come.

        Iraqis didn't welcome the U.S. Army with flowers and music. On the contrary, the men on the street and the women behind their doors acted as if they weren't seeing the noisy American tanks and military vehicles rolling by. As far as the people were concerned they were nonexistent.

        The days of dictator Saddam Hussein were numbered but the people's faces showed no joy. Nobody _ I thought then _ is happy to have their house invaded. But that first stark resistance was portentous.
Another observation: I was shocked that there were no Iraqi soldiers or Republican Guard firing at the advancing American troops. But then my translator told me to take a look at the Iraqis' feet.

        "If they're wearing boots or shoes, they're from Saddam Hussein's army," he said. "The others wear sandals or go barefoot."

        Most of that day, entering Iraq, I found myself looking down. True or false, everything seemed to indicate that the Iraqi mujahedin had shed their army uniforms and had scattered among the civilian population.

        The resistance that I noted three years ago, together with the multiplication of insurgent and terrorist groups, has turned Iraq into a dead-end street for America and its president. The possibility of a civil war in Iraq, pitting Shiites against Sunnites, is now more real than ever.

        The terrorist groups, including al-Qaida, have used the American occupation of Iraq to justify their attacks against the United States and their allies. Now, the most mundane activities _ walking down the streets of Baghdad, going to the grocery store to buy food, visiting friends, eating at a restaurant _ have become near-suicidal undertakings.

        The only normal thing in Iraq is a violent death, both for Americans and Iraqis. More than 2,000 American soldiers have been killed and the Iraqi civilian casualty number is around 30,000, though nobody really knows how many have perished.

        The Iraq adventure has exerted a brutal toll on President George W. Bush's popularity. A recent poll by USA Today/CNN shows that only 36 percent of Americans supports Bush's performance.

        So it is hard to remember that, just after 9/11, Bush was one of the most supported world leaders. Who couldn't help feeling sympathy for the leader of a nation that had lost nearly 3,000 citizens in a cowardly terrorist attack?

        But, in the Iraq war, Bush has squandered his main strength as a leader: credibility. More than half of the American people (51 percent) believe Bush lied about the real reasons for the Iraq war. Many Americans have yet to understand Bush's unforgivable mistake of launching a war when he had no irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and intended sharing them with terrorists.

        Furthermore, the torture and abuse by American soldiers at the Abou Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons have destroyed America's credibility as a critic of human rights conditions elsewhere in the world. How can the United States legitimately criticize what's going on in Venezuela, Nigeria or Myanmar, following the revelation of the Abou Ghraib torture videos?

        There's no doubt that Saddam was a despicable tyrant. But he did not order the 9/11 attacks. The one who did is called Osama bin Laden, and he is still at large. It is difficult to understand today, three years after the beginning of the war, why the billions of dollars wasted in Iraq were not instead spent on finding Osama.

        Today, I can better understand the actions of the president's father in 1991. At the end of the Gulf War, I was in a hotel in Beirut, along with other journalists, waiting for the order from then-President George H.W. Bush to invade Iraq.

        Iraqi soldiers were fleeing from Kuwait _ after a six-month occupation _ and everything indicated that Baghdad was just around the corner for the American troops. They would be able to reach the city within two or three days.

        But that order never arrived. I remember our bewilderment. "Why did Bush (senior) not want to invade Iraq, when he had Saddam on his knees?" we wondered.
The answer today is very clear. Because anyone invading Iraq would inherit the impossible mission of ruling an ethnic jigsaw puzzle, and a military nightmare. Bush, Jr., obviously, paid no heed to the lessons of history that his father helped craft.

        The grave question about the Iraq war is not how the United States got into it without verifiable justification or enough troops, but that it did so without a measured and concrete plan, or a foreseeable date to withdraw.
The panorama is not an encouraging one. I'm afraid that in three more years, after the end of Bush's presidency, we'll be writing about the exact same things. Let's see in 2009.