UN human rights investigator Paul Hunt is calling for an independent inquiry into how the U.S. military's siege of Fallujah has affected civilians.

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Meanwhile, U.S. officials have tossed aside one Iraqi general and named another to command an Iraqi brigade in Fallujah.

They now say former intelligence officer Mohammed Latif and not Republican Guard veteran Mohammed Jasim Saleh will lead Iraqi forces in disarming Fallujah's insurgents.

It is still not clear who ordered the siege of Fallujah in response to the killing and mutilation of four American "security contractors" (mercenaries) at the end of March, but it was a blunder that will be studied in military staff colleges for decades to come, the lesson being: When there is no way that you can succeed, it is wiser not to reveal your weakness by trying and failing.

There was no way that U.S. Marines could occupy Fallujah and destroy the local resistance forces without killing thousands of Iraqis, most of them civilians. There was no way that they could ever identify and capture the men who killed and mutilated the "contractors." Besieging the city was an emotional response that made no military or political sense, as they realized about three weeks too late.

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But in only one month they have inadvertently succeeded in reviving Iraqi pride and national identity on the basis of a shared anti-Americanism, and given the whole Arab and Muslim world nightly television lessons in how popular resistance can defeat U.S. power.

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Gen. Saleh drove into Fallujah on Friday wearing his old Iraqi army uniform and waving the old Iraqi flag that the puppet "Iraqi Governing Council" has just abolished. The people of Fallujah had "rejected" the U.S. Marines, he said, and both he and local U.S. Marine commanders made it clear that the new emergency military force would include some of the resistance fighters in the city. On Sunday the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, insisted that Gen. Saleh had not yet been given the job, but that just put the extent of the disarray in the U.S. military on public display.

Being over-stretched, American troops adopted Israeli-style overkill in Fallujah and other cities, with disastrous consequences.

After four American contractors were killed and mutilated on March 31st, an American assault on Fallujah, according to The Economist, killed hundreds, including civilians who were targeted in several ways. The power station was bombed and the bridge across the Euphrates was closed.

It is only recently that the gruesome details of what happened in Fallujah have appeared in the English press and the outside world remained in the dark about them for quite some time.

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Iraqi minister of health, Khudair Abbas has accused the American troops of having fired at ambulances in Fallujah and other places.

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If the policy makers in Washington ask the question as to what has been their biggest failure in the past three years, the inevitable answer will be that they have made America far more unpopular in the Islamic world than ever before. It is most unfortunate that the deepest rift to have opened up since 9/11 is the one between America and the world of Islam.

Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel Berger, writing in this month's Foreign Affairs magazine about the Bush advisers, has perceptively observed: "Key strategists appear to believe that, in a chaotic world, United States power - and especially military power - is the only real force for advancing United States interests, that as long as the United States is feared, it does not matter if we are not admired."

It appears the Bush administration has taken a fancy to the famous saying of Roman Emperor Caligula (A. D. 37-41): "Let them hate, as long as they fear.

In the Jolan district, people were clearing up.

We got a rare glimpse of the effect of American air strikes in a residential area. We saw many houses that had been flattened.

The only sign of fighters was in posters up on the walls.

This is the neighbourhood where fighting was fiercest - where the Americans met their stiffest resistance.

But it was always an uneven battle, and there is fury in Falluja at what people here say was an indiscriminate use of American force.

Six of the tall mosque towers that punctuate Fallujah's low-rise horizon were badly blasted by U.S. tanks and artillery during the fighting, while football-size holes were punched in many houses by heavy rounds.

"A tank fired at my mosque tower, even though there were no fighters in it," said Sheikh Abdul Aziz, pointing to a minaret with a door-size gap through it. "Then they came along and said, 'Sorry, we got the wrong mosque' - - and put their own snipers in there instead."

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Although the streets were all but deserted and nearly all the shops still shut, the traditional Arab obligation of welcome toward strangers was back on offer again.

"You must remember that most people here are very kind. We welcome civilians here now, even Americans," said Sheikh Mohamed Al Kubhaisi, sitting in a mosque side room that was filled with boxes of donated food and medical supplies.

Picking up a bullet from his desk, one of half a dozen dug out of the walls of his house next to the mosque, he added: "The only thing we do not like is the American soldiers -- and they started this fight, not us.

"None of us approved of the way those four security guards were killed and mutilated last month. We imams even put out an order saying it should never be done again.

"What more could we do?"

Finding the culprits and handing them over to the Iraqi police presumably would have been one option. U.S. Marine commanders made it clear at the time that had such steps been taken, the siege of the city might never have been launched.

But like most Fallujans, that is an area where Kubhaisi is a little inconsistent. The glorious and noble standoff against the Marines was all the work of locals, not foreign militants, he insists.

But the gory mutilation of the four bodyguards? "That was outsiders. Nobody knew who they were, and they disappeared afterwards."

Whether or not the culprits are still around, the Marines have reluctantly accepted that their original mission to nail them has ended in stalemate.