In an interview with BBC Radio, the embattled Mr. Blair said it would take time to "prise the grip of Saddam off the country when it's been there for over 20 years", expressing what many British and American officers know first hand what senior U.S. officers are only now beginning to admit in public: That Iraqi resistance is a lot tougher than they were expecting.

"When you've had a whole series of security services repressing the local people, it was never going to be a situation these people were simply going to give up power and go away", the British Premier reckoned, confirming what another young American soldier told Reuters, that "Right here the odds are against us, we don't know the terrain, we don't know the people, we don't know what they got coming for us".

A week after invading Iraq, "I feel like the longer I'm out here, the less are my chances of staying alive," said U.S. Marine Lance-Corporal Michael Sanchez, staring with sullen eyes at a vista of withered roadside shrubs.

Like his comrades, Sanchez had expected a kind of "Baghdad run", surging unopposed to the capital in the wake of a massive bombing campaign that would have cracked Iraqi resolve.

Instead, members of his convoy have been shot at by snipers, snarled up in a sandstorm, and stuck for days in a patch of wilderness populated chiefly by irritating gnats. "On this road leading to the southern town of Nassiriya, there are no garlands offered by grateful young women to the "liberators" -- only a threat of ambush, mines and booby traps", Green reported.

"Where's the exotic women, I thought they were supposed to do some belly dancing or something?" Sanchez said, to laughter from comrades reclining in their "fighting holes".

Adds a political analyst: "The Americans should have read the Iran-Iraq war and learn from the mistakes made by both Saddam Hoseyn and Ayatollah Roohollah Khomeini, the first one counting on the Arab-speaking people of southern Iran, forgetting that they are Iranians that speaks Arabic and the second thinking because the majority of the Iraqis are of Shi’ite branch of Islam, they would rise up against their Sunni-led government, forgetting that they are Iraqis and as such, they would defend their nation against any invader, even Shi’ite".

Hooshang Hasan Yari, a professor at the Canadian Military College observed that while in the first Iraq war, the Allied pounded the Iraqis for more than five weeks with heavy bombardment, this time, the American and British troops entered the hostile country two days after aerial attack. "There is also a major difference between the two wars, in that in the first one, the coalition forces were driven the Iraqi out of Kuwait and in this one, they are facing an army defending its very territory", he told the Persian service of the BBC.

French experts also confirmed these views. "During meetings with American colleagues before they went to war, we told them that they would face stiff resistance not only from the Iraqi armies, but also from the people. We told them not to mistake the first (Persian) Gulf War, which was waged for the liberation of Kuwait, the French centrist daily "Le Figaro" quoted a French officer who describes himself as "pro-American".

They also agreed that U.S. concern to avoid casualties, both on their own side and among Iraqi civilians, has also contributed to slowing the pace of the advance on the Iraqi capital in Washington's campaign to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

But American officials rejected criticism that the invasion to topple Mr. Hoseyn and rid Iraq of illegal weapons was becoming bogged down. "The Iraqi regime will be disarmed. The Iraqi regime will be removed from power. Iraq will be free", President Bush assured.

With the American and British leaders now acknowledging that the war might last much longer than predicted and as a consequence, more casualties, what many European, Arab and Iranian experts fear more is a halt to the conflict, as voiced by many nations, including France, Germany, Russia, Arab and Muslims, as well as the public opinion in the pro-war camp like Italy and Spain.

[The German architect of one of Saddam Hussein's main bunkers in Baghdad said on Friday the Iraqi president can survive anything short of a direct hit with a nuclear bomb if he stays within its 1.5 metre thick walls.

"It could withstand the shock wave of a nuclear bomb the size of the Hiroshima one detonating 250 metres away", said Karl Esser, a security consultant who designed the bunker underneath Saddam's main presidential palace in Baghdad].

And what about Major Bernie Lindstrom, of 937 Engineer Group, who told Reuters: "I always thought this thing would end up taking six months or more. Let's think about what it means, what would happen if Saddam just does an Osama Ben Laden and ends up in hiding somewhere?