America: Republican Congressman Walter Jones is best remembered for his successful campaign before the Iraq war to change the term "French fries" to "freedom fries" on Capitol Hill menus.
"Watching France's self-serving politics discouraged me more than I can say," he explained, referring to President Jacques Chirac's refusal to back a UN resolution approving the US-led invasion.
The 62-year-old congressman was undoubtedly responding to an upsurge of patriotism in his North Carolina district, location of several US military bases, as the US prepared to topple an enemy who, they were told, had weapons of mass destruction and was in league with Osama bin Laden.
Mr Jones is once again discouraged more than he can say, but this time it is with the war he once supported so strongly.
On Thursday he joined with fellow Republican Ron Paul of Texas and Democrats Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii to call on President George Bush to "set a plan and a date" to begin bringing American troops home, starting no later than October 2006 (the month before the next congressional elections).
The war has "no justification", he now says, reflecting a growing public impatience with the endless flow of bad news from Iraq.
Almost six out of 10 Americans want the US to pull its troops out of Iraq, according to a recent Gallup poll, and almost half say they want them home immediately.
Two in three Americans fear that the country is getting bogged down in Iraq, just as it did in Vietnam, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll.
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted this week that he cannot say when he could start drawing down the 139,000 US troops serving there.
Some 40 per cent of these are National Guard soldiers or reservists who have left families and jobs back home, and whose absence creates problems for state governors who need the part-time soldiers for local emergencies.
Recruitment for the National Guard is 30 per cent down, and once-coveted places at US military academies are not being filled up.
The first incident of "fragging", the killing of officers by soldiers, is being interpreted as a sign of low morale and discipline in the forces.
On Wednesday the army announced that a staff sergeant has been charged with the murder of two commanders at Tikrit army base, whose deaths on June 7th were first attributed to enemy action.
The word "fragging" entered military language in Vietnam where 82 officers were killed by their own men between 1969 and 1971 as GIs lost faith in the war they were fighting.
At the end of May vice- president Dick Cheney assured the country that the Iraqi insurgency was in its "last throes".
His timing was unfortunate. In the first two weeks of June 47 Americans were killed in Iraq, compared to 42 in the whole of June last year, bringing the overall American death toll to 1,713.
Today almost three in four Americans feel the US casualty levels are "unacceptable", the highest proportion since the war began.
President Bush spoke on May 31st of "making progress" in Iraq and maintains that a timetable for withdrawal cannot be considered until Iraq's security forces are strong enough to defeat the insurgents.
Having planned to spend the summer focusing on his embattled plan to overhaul social security, he is instead being increasingly forced to defend his war policies - and his pre-war planning.
The Downing Street memo, in which the head of British intelligence reported that "intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy" (to invade Iraq), and dated before Congress gave war powers to the president, has become a "smoking gun" for the anti-war lobby.
On Thursday Democrats held an informal hearing in a Capitol Hill basement at which Congressman John Conyers of Michigan accused the Bush administration of deceiving Congress.
The series of witnesses included the mother of a 24-year- old soldier killed in Iraq who accused the leadership of rushing "into an illegal invasion of another sovereign country on prefabricated and cherry-picked evidence."
Hundreds protested outside the White House after the hearing and called for the president to be impeached. The writing is on the wall - or in the polls - for Republicans seeking re-election next year.
Only 37 per cent of Americans approve of President Bush's handling of Iraq, according to a New York Times-CBS poll yesterday which showed his approval rating has fallen to 42 per cent, the lowest of his presidency.
In a sign of President Bush's weakening authority, Republicans and Democrats defied his veto threat and this week voted 238-271 to delete a controversial clause in the Patriot Act that allows the FBI to check what books people are taking out of libraries.
The row over conditions at Guantanamo Bay has also exposed strains on the Republican side.
At a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Republican Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania criticised the "crazy quilt" system that governs the treatment of prisoners at "Gitmo".
Party colleague Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina warned that if they could not come up with an effective policy for detainees, "we're going to lose this war".
The Senate's second-ranking Democrat, Richard Durbin of Illinois, compared the US military's ill-treatment of a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist with the acts of the regimes of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Pol Pot, earning him the title of "Turban Durbin" from outraged conservatives.