Military walk fine line between upbeat message and sombre reality of conflict

At the briefing given yesterday by General Tommy Franks, the Iraq campaign commander faced one task even more immediate than capturing Baghdad: recapturing the headlines and dispelling talk that the US and British invasion was getting bogged down by a string of unexpected setbacks.

Not at all, General Franks replied. Saddam Hussein might be back on the air, and US troops might have been captured and paraded before Arab TV, but, he insisted, Iraqi resistance was "sporadic", and coalition troops were making "rapid and in some cases dramatic" progress to their goal.

The truth of that will be plain in coming days. Right now, the Iraq campaign obliges the administration and the US military command to walk a fine line. They must at once prepare the country for a longer war than expected yet keep the message sufficiently upbeat to make it seem victory is at hand.

Part of the problem is the ease and speed with which the US has prevailed in recent conflicts. The ground phase of Gulf War One in 1991 lasted 100 hours, and the conflict cost just 142 US casualties, many from "friendly fire". Not one American died as Slobodan Milosevic's troops were forced out of Kosovo in 1999, and the Afghan war was won in less than two months, with few casualties and a far smaller military force.

And so, people assumed, it would be in Iraq this time. The impression was heightened by TV images of cruise missiles streaking from US warships, vast detonations around Baghdad, and US 7th Cavalry armoured units sweeping across the open desert towards the Iraqi capital. Stocks soared and oil prices plunged, in expectation of an easy victory.

All that changed over the weekend, with the first serious casualties, and scattered but dogged Iraqi resistance in places which were not supposed to resist at all. After eight successive daily rises, the Dow was down some 300 points at mid-session yesterday.

Thus far, public support for the war and President George Bush's approval ratings are a healthy 65 to 70 per cent. But the mood is sombre. A CBS-New York Times poll on Sunday found a majority, 53 per cent, say the war against Iraq could take months, compared with a majority just 24 hours earlier which believed the fighting would be over in a few weeks.

A similar pattern emerged in an ABC-Washington Post survey, which found those expecting a significant number of casualties had jumped from 37 per cent to 54 per cent. A third poll showed just 44 per cent of the public believed the war was going well on Sunday, down from 62 per cent on Saturday.

Even Mr Bush was guarded on whether the regime would collapse quickly. "All I know is we've got a game plan, a strategy to free the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein and rid his country of weapons of mass destruction, and we're on plan."

Today the White House is expected to ask Congress for $75bn (£48bn) of supplementary funds to pay for the war, a sum likely to rise if extended fighting pushes up reconstruction costs, and requires the presence of a larger American garrison later.

The truth is dawning is that Iraq is different from the 1991 Gulf War, Kosovo and the Afghan campaign. At bottom, this is an unprovoked invasion. Some analysts see a parallel with 1941 when, despite the horrors of Stalin's regime, Russia united behind him to repel the German invader.