The joke was not just a bitter reference to the accelerating Iraqi exodus from Iraq, however. It reflected a widespread Iraqi feeling that Americans harboured a secret wish: an Iraq without Iraqis. The country's failure to organise a competent government, end the inter-communal violence, create a professional national army to replace the sectarian militias, and knuckle down to building a modern democratic state had drained the last ounce of American patience, it seemed. Blame for the disaster was increasingly being put on Iraqis themselves. The Americans had sacrificed thousands of their troops' lives and billions of U.S. taxpayers' dollars. If things were not working, it must be the Iraqis' fault.

Judging by their behaviour, many U.S. officials certainly seemed to prefer as little contact with Iraqis as possible. Even in the early days of the occupation in 2003, when travel outside Baghdad's Green Zone was perfectly defeat safe, they confined themselves to a narrow set of contacts. When Barbara Bodine, a tough former U.S. diplomat who was appointed by Washington to be Baghdad's first post-invasion mayor, suggested she would open her office in the city centre, "there were cries of horror -- 'There are Iraqis there,' " an occupation official told me.

American advisers and other political staff in Iraq made little attempt to read up on Iraqi history or Arab culture. The State Department and other U.S. agencies sent few of their Arabic-speakers. The available pool was not large before the invasion, and many U.S. Arabists avoided applying for posts in Iraq, either because they knew enough about the Middle East to realise the invasion was a blunder, or because they feared a Baghdad posting would be a career-killer.

"The number of Americans who spoke Arabic in the Coalition Provisional Authority was shamefully, shockingly low," commented Noah Feldman, who was senior constitutional adviser to the CPA, as the U.S. occupation's civilian administration was called. He described how "a chill went over me" when he peeped at what his fellow passengers were reading in the U.S. military transport plane that flew him and other U.S. officials to Baghdad in May 2003. "Not one seemed to need a refresher on Iraq or the Gulf region. Without exception, they were reading new books on the American occupation and reconstruction of Germany and Japan," he recalled.

Three and a half years later, when the USA was mired in massive difficulties in Iraq, the Bush administration's use of expertise was still feeble. The Baker-Hamilton Report revealed that in a staff of 1,000 at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad there were only six Americans with fluent Arabic. It also revealed that the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington, which was supposed to give advice on the aims and attitudes of America's enemies, had fewer than ten staffers with more than two years' experience of analysing the Iraqi insurgency. Officials were constantly rotated to new assignments.

Was this incompetence or wilful ignorance, a feeling that there was no need to try to understand what the majority of Iraqis were saying or thinking? Iraqis were going to be given a Western-style secular liberal democracy, whether they wanted it or not. Or perhaps the Americans and British subconsciously sensed they might be told things they did not want to hear -- it was better to stay in the Green Zone and the coalition's provincial HQs, and talk only to those Iraqis who had clear benefits to gain from the occupation, such as jobs on its payroll or project grants.

Some Iraqis sought to make their views known. Sometimes they tried their hand at English. Spelling was not his strong point, but the person who wrote the graffiti on the pedestal where Saddam Hussein's statue once stood in Baghdad's Firdous Square had a clear message: "All donne, go home."

It was less than three months since U.S. Marines had put steel hawsers round the statue's metal neck and brought it crashing to the ground. Shown live on television, the scene was the iconic proof of a great American victory, regularly replayed in countless documentaries. The Marines briefly hoisted the Stars and Stripes above Saddam's head, a humiliating image of conquest that Iraqis and millions of other Arab TV-watchers remember, even if most Americans forget. Weeks later, American troops were still posted outside the nearby Palestine Hotel and U.S. officials frequently visited the building, which housed several American TV networks. They could not avoid seeing that at least one Iraqi graffiti-writer had already lost patience with the occupation.

Prominent Iraqis were more polite, although even they were reluctant to thank the Americans for the invasion. There was a telling moment when the 25 Iraqis whom the USA had just appointed to the so-called Interim Governing Council (IGC) were paraded before the media in Saddam's old convention centre on 13 July 2003. Halfway through the proceedings Ahmad Chalabi, the long-time exile who became the Pentagon's favourite Iraqi, strode to the microphone to say he wished "to express the gratitude of the Iraqi people to President Bush and Prime Minister Blair for liberating Iraq." We waited for applause. The other 24 appointees looked stunned and embarrassed. No one clapped Chalabi's remarks, even though comments by earlier speakers had been applauded.

Insensitive to his colleagues' views but with an eye on L. Paul Bremer, the CPA boss who was sitting in the front row below the stage, Chalabi ploughed on. He proposed that 9 April, the day the Saddam statue was toppled, should become a national holiday with the title Liberation Day. Again, there was silence. At its first working session shortly afterwards the IGC did take up the idea of a national holiday but they pointedly rejected Chalabi's title. They decided to call 9 April The Day the Regime Fell.

The council's avoidance of the L-word (in his memoirs Bremer always spelt it with a capital 'L') reflected its members' understanding that few Iraqis were as jubilant about the invasion as Chalabi. This fact had become clear in the very first days when U.S. troops came across armed resistance on the edge of Basra and in the largely Shia city of Nassiriya. It did not conform to the pre-war briefings they had received. "I imagined Iraqi women would be greeting us with flowers in our gun tubes, and holding up babies to be kissed," one American soldier who almost lost his life in Nassiriya commented later.

Within hours of Saddam's downfall reporters repeatedly met Iraqis who felt shame and anger at finding their country under occupation. Many were deeply suspicious of American intentions. My translator, Abbas Ali Hussein, took me to his family home in Baghdad on 15 April, just less than a week after the Saddam statue was toppled. His brother Hassan was sitting in the sparsely furnished front room looking depressed. Was he some unhappy Saddam supporter, I wondered? Far from it. Now in his early thirties, Hassan explained he had studied at Baghdad's prestigious oil institute a decade earlier but on graduation decided not to take a job as a geologist or engineer. The state had a monopoly of oil extraction and refining, and Hassan felt he hated Saddam Hussein too much to want to work for the Iraqi regime. Instead, he found a job in the private sector as a taxi driver.

Well educated, a man of principle, and a Shia, here was the kind of man who, the Americans expected, would surely be thrilled by the arrival of U.S. troops. Washington saw Iraq in sectarian terms and viewed the Shias, along with the Kurds, as the biggest victims of Saddam's regime. What did Hassan think of the dictator's removal from power? "Saddam betrayed us," he told me.

Startled, I asked him what he meant. "He didn't organise any resistance in Baghdad," Hassan replied. He went on to hint that there might have been a secret deal between Bush and Saddam under which Saddam would refrain from ordering his forces to defend the capital. Abbas nodded in agreement. "The United States must leave Iraq to the Iraqi people. We must rule ourselves," he said. "We have many educated people. We can do this. We want the Americans to leave today."

The next day, at Baghdad's main hospital for children, I found the same sense of shame that foreign troops were in the heart of the Iraqi capital. Dr. Abdul Hamid al-Saddoun, a heart specialist, was presiding over a scene of monumental scarcity. Sick children lay on cheap vinyl mattresses under tattered blankets. There were no sheets. Guards at the front gate had done an outstanding job in keeping looters out of the building, but the hospital was chronically short of basic equipment, from oxygen canisters to bandages, gauze, and surgical gloves. Dr. Saddoun said he was appealing to the Americans for supplies, but he also wanted them out. "Everything is settling down now. Iraq will be Iraq. We will not accept an American or British occupation," he insisted.

On the second Friday after U.S. troops entered Baghdad, nationalist pride and Islamist fervour were in full view on the streets. Thousands poured out of mosques in the mainly Sunni district of Adhamiya, chanting both anti-Saddam and anti-American slogans. The organisers called themselves the Iraqi National United Movement and said they represented both Muslim communities, Sunni and Shia. One of the biggest columns emerged from the Abu Hanifa mosque, whose dome was damaged during the invasion. "No to America. No to Saddam. Our revolution is Islamic," some chanted. One protester I interviewed prefigured the insurgency: "We will give the Americans a few months to leave Iraq. If they do not, we will fight them with knives," he said. I watched as a dozen U.S. marines appeared in front of the marchers. A few protesters waved their fists and shouted "America is God's enemy." The troops turned into an alley and there was no confrontation.

The following week, hundreds of thousands of Shias turned out for the annual pilgrimage to Kerbala to the shrine of Imam Hussein, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad. Hussein was executed or "martyred," as Shias say, after being taken prisoner. Under Saddam pilgrims were banned from walking along the main roads; they had to make their way to Kerbala in small groups in vehicles or through villages. Now they celebrated their freedom, marching in long columns down the main highway south from Baghdad, or north from Nassiriya and other cities in the Shia heartland. The atmosphere was good humoured, even though the festival of Ashoura is essentially a collective mourning, during which many carry palm fronds and flagellate themselves symbolically.

The mass march was not designed to be explicitly political. However, the huge outpouring of Shias onto one of Iraq's key highways for the first time for a generation could not help but send a political message. Here was a community coming alive at last. The image of Saddam's statue being toppled was what Americans saw as the defining moment of their invasion, even though fewer than 200 Iraqis were on hand and most watched in silence. For Iraqis the televised tides of devout Shias presented a more powerful picture of a new Iraq. It was an exclusively Iraqi event, and there was little in the mood of the marchers to comfort Bush or Washington's neoconservatives.