Suspect fired three shots at Baghdad Hotel; the vehicle used by the assailant was already spotted while involved into [sic] hostile surveillance of CF position.”And so on and on. In one 24-hour period, the UN recorded six attacks across Iraq, including an RPG fired at an American camp near Mosul, an assault on an Iraqi police station in Muqidiyah, north-east of Baghdad, a heavy machine- gun fired at US troops during a medical evacuation near Karbala and a car that tried to ram an American checkpoint near Qatum.One of the more disturbing elements of the American reports is the separation of incidents involving US troops and the violence inflicted on civilians or Iraqi police.On the attack at the police station, the gunman is referred to as a “criminal”. Assaults on Americans are described as “significant incidents” while assaults on Iraqi civilians – during the theft of their cars, for example – are referred to under the simple heading of “crime”. American lives, the underlying tenor of these reports seems to be, are more important than innocent Iraqi lives.Another security report – this time from the UN – records the third attempt by guerrillas to shoot down an American helicopter near Karbala with an anti-aircraft gun.

The latest incident occurred only hours after a ground-to-air missile was fired at an American C-130 military cargo aircraft at Baghdad airport, an attack that was publicly acknowledged.Where the gunmen hide so big a weapon as an anti-aircraft gun is not recorded.But the message of all this information – most of it unreported by the media – is that the Americans are no longer safe anywhere in Iraq: not at Baghdad airport, which they captured with so much fanfare in early April, not at their military bases, not in the streets of central Baghdad or in their helicopters or on the country roads A regular guerrilla war has broken out in Iraq And it’s getting ever more out of control
More from Robert Fisk. Faced with ever greater armed resistance to its occupation of Iraq, the US is admitting only a fraction of the attacks in the country against its forces, who lost another two soldiers yesterday. But because they suffered no casualties, the incident was not disclosed to the press. Two days earlier, a bomb described by the Americans as an “improved explosive device” (IED) – a set of mortar shells tied together – blew up outside a Baghdad bank, injuring one soldier. That attack went publicly unrecorded.A set of security documents prepared by US military authorities, which has been seen by The Independent, show “IEDs” are becoming one of the favourite weapons of Iraqi guerrillas, often combined with rocket-propelled grenades and rifle fire. The documents mention 10 security “incidents” in Baghdad alone during a 48-hour period at the end of last week.The Americans know their opponents are manufacturing their bombs in makeshift “factories” in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq. But US forces have decided only to report their “victories” – when they seize arms and mines and detain hundreds of Iraqis.

The US civilian administrator, Paul Bremer, acknowledged there was a continuing security problem, but contended “most of the country is quiet”. He also said that while the Americans believed Saddam Hussein was still in Iraq, he was not orchestrating the attacks.Yesterday’s killing of two Americans – another was wounded in the incident – happened in an area where US forces arrested dozens of young men the previous week. Talafar was also the scene of the first uprising against British rule in Iraq 83 years ago. An Iraqi working for the UN was also killed yesterday when his blue UN vehicle was ambushed south of Baghdad
More from Robert Fisk. I was pleased to find from the league tables published last week by the Commission for Health Improvement that the hospital which I have been briefly in and out of recently, the Chelsea and Westminster in west London, gained three stars, just like the best French restaurants. However, I didn’t need the ratings system to tell me that the Chelsea and Westminster is good. I had already come to that conclusion from the standpoint of a patient.

Excellence and inefficiency alike are pervasive throughout an organisation. You cannot have an excellent top management and poor interactions with customers, nor the reverse It is all of a piece. I have never met the management of the Chelsea and Westminster, but they must be doing quite a lot of things right.Typical of a London organisation, the Chelsea and Westminster employs many people at all levels whose first language is not English I couldn’t see that this made any difference at all. One of the senior nurses on my floor was Spanish and had come to this country after leaving school She was sometimes in charge at night. Her language skills were wholly appropriate for the job in hand Another was Scandinavian Ditto. One of the heads of department with whom I dealt was Greek.In its staff and patients, the Chelsea and Westminster is a sort of United Nations. Once or twice I thought I had been transported back in time to the old British Empire when I heard the voice of a pukka English colonel booming from one of the beds.