In December 1977, US president Jimmy Carter visited Iran. He publicly praised the Shah of Iran for his leadership in turning Iran into an "island of stability" in a dangerously unstable region.

A month later, student riots erupted in Iran and by January 1979 the Shah was forced to flee the country, Ayatollah Khomeini was in power and Iran plunged into revolutionary upheaval.

Expressing anger at decades of American interference in Iran and support for the brutality of the Shah's regime, Iranian students stormed the American embassy and seized American diplomats as hostages.

It was also one of the most humiliating illustrations of how oblivious American policymakers can be to the consequences of policies that preach human rights and democracy, and of actions that belie these values. It was a sobering lesson on the cost of arrogantly ignoring the signs of a gathering storm.

The Bush administration has been particularly apt at ignoring early signs of self-delusion. This was the case for instance when then secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, building support for the Iraq war, reassured the country that the coming war in Iraq could last five weeks or five months but "certainly no more than that".

There was another sign when Vice-President Dick Cheney, preferring to dismiss the growing resistance to American occupation than to acknowledge its reality, predicted two years ago that the Iraqi insurgency was in its "last throes".

Neither of these two leading architects of the war would acknowledge that they had been misguided. Bush was forced to acknowledge that the US was not winning in Iraq, but still insisted on more escalation of the war, as more evidence emerged on how the Bush administration misled the American people.

The Pentagon's own inspector general recently confirmed what we had known for some time, namely that the rational for war was largely fabricated in the office of Under-Secretary of Defence Douglas Feith and supported by Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon, validated in the office of Cheney, and welcomed by Bush - anxious to "fix the facts to fit the policy" - as the Downing Street Memo revealed.

Bush and his entourage then proceeded to mislead the American people. The Congress is still unwilling to hold the president accountable.

Events in Iraq, however, are proving less accommodating than the US Congress. First there is the deteriorating military reality in Iraq. It is obvious and extensively covered by the American media.

Four months into the Bush administration's strategy of escalation of violence, the army of occupation is not able to secure even the capital of Iraq, let alone stamping out the insurgency. Internal Pentagon documents admit this reality.

The insurgency has also shown boldness in coming out in the open and carrying out coordinated attacks that involved open street battles with government forces in several Iraqi cities.

Combination

The gathering storm is further fuelled by a combination of military paralysis and political failures. The political failures are documented in reports prepared by the UN and by various agencies of the American government.

The dubious democratic credentials of the Iraqi government came under attack when a United Nations report accused the government of failing to seriously address human rights abuses including torture in Iraq.

The UN also expressed concern for the "apparent lack" of judicial guarantees for detainees arrested during the latest American strategy for Baghdad. Corruption seems rampant. Iraqi officials from various governments that succeeded the occupation authority are accused of stealing billions of dollars in reconstruction funds.

Facing a republican revolt, dwindling public support at home, military setbacks and economic and political failures in Iraq, Bush spoke recently again in terms of "winning" in Iraq against the same people "who attacked us in America on September the 11th".

Bush is also building in Iraq the largest US embassy in the world. If Carter was blissfully ignorant of the gathering storm in Iran and the American embassy in Tehran and the region bore the cost, Bush is making sure that the American embassy in Baghdad symbolises his defiance of all the signs of the gathering storm.

Professor Adel Safty is Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Siberian Academy of Public Administration, Novosibirsk, Russia. He is author of From Camp David to the Gulf, Montreal, New York.