BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 28 — The military on Friday announced the death of one American soldier, bringing the death toll so far in April to 69, the highest in five months. The monthly figure disrupted a trend of steadily falling American fatalities that had begun in November.

The bulk of American deaths in April occurred in Baghdad and in the insurgent-controlled western province of Anbar, according to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, an independent group that compiles casualty figures based on information provided by the American military.

Deaths in April could still climb, but are not likely to top the 84 American deaths in November. The April figure is more than double the 31 troops killed in March, one of the lowest monthly tolls of the war, according to the group's statistics.

Though American deaths have fluctuated since the invasion in 2003, they had been falling since November, when the toll fell to 84 from 96 the previous month.

American deaths reached a peak in April and November of 2004, topping 100 in both months, when the military fought operations in Najaf and Falluja.

The soldier, whose name had not yet been released, was killed at 7:15 p.m. on Thursday in an explosion that tore into his vehicle when it hit a roadside bomb north of Baghdad.

The military also announced the death of a man it identified as a senior leader of Al Qaeda in the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad. An assault force of American troops killed the man, identified as Hamadi Abd al-Takhi al-Nissani, as he tried to flee a house about nine miles north of the city on Friday, the military said in a statement. Two other men inside the house were also killed, it said, one as he tried to throw a grenade at American forces.

The death toll continued to rise from a coordinated series of insurgent attacks on Thursday near Baquba, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad, which led to street battles with Iraqi government forces.

The fighting began around 1:30 p.m., when insurgents fired mortars and rocket-propelled grenades at five police checkpoints, a police station and an Iraqi Army building, officials said.

The series of attacks, unusual in their intensity and duration — the American military said in a statement that one attack involved more than 100 insurgents — seemed aimed at gaining control over a swath of fertile land that is central to the security of the capital.

Local residents, predominantly Sunni Arabs, have been staunchly opposed to the American occupation, and the area has long been a haven for Sunni Arab guerrilla fighters.

Earlier tallies put the death toll at 36, including 21 insurgents, 11 Iraqi police officers and soldiers, and 2 civilians. The Associated Press on Friday cited an Iraqi police official, Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Awad, as saying the toll had climbed to 58.

On Friday, the city was placed under a curfew, but fighting continued in some areas. The Associated Press reported that witnesses saw at least two wounded police officers being carried away.

The insurgents who staged the Baquba attacks were drawn from four groups from Diyala Province, said a Baquba police official who declined to be identified because he feared reprisals.

In Baghdad, authorities found the bodies of two men. In the northern city of Kirkuk, a child was killed and two were injured when a roadside bomb aimed at American forces exploded, said Col. Mahmoud Hussein of the Kirkuk police. In Falluja, west of Baghdad, gunmen killed two Iraqi police officers around 9 p.m. on Thursday.

One of Iraq's vice presidents, Adel Abdul Mahdi, offered a new count of Iraqis who have been displaced because of sectarian violence. Speaking in the southern city of Najaf, Mr. Mahdi said about 100,000 families had been forced to flee their homes nationwide, Reuters reported. Previously, the Iraqi government estimated that about 11,000 families had been forced to flee.

Omar al-Neami and Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting for this article.

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Tens of Thousands in NYC Protest War

Envoy to Iraq Predicts U.S. May Need to Stay in Region for Years

No one was more prescient about the problems that could ensue from the present Bush administration's invasion of Iraq than Gen. Tony Zinni, the former commander in chief of United States Central Command (Centcom) and Mr. Bush's former envoy to the Middle East.

As early as 1998 (when neoconservatives began agitating for the removal of Saddam Hussein), General Zinni was warning that "a weakened, fragmented, chaotic Iraq" could be "more dangerous in the long run than a contained Saddam." And in 2002, as the war drums beat louder and louder in Washington, General Zinni warned that invading Iraq could create more enemies for America in the Middle East, stretch the American military too thin, strain relations with allies and cost billions of dollars for reconstruction.

General Zinni, who as commander of Centcom had prepared contingency plans for the possible fall of Mr. Hussein, also recommended that if an invasion of Iraq were pursued, it should rely upon "overwhelming force," and that a comprehensive plan for reconstruction be adopted before the war. His outline of such a plan (dealing with the protection of infrastructure, the sealing of borders, political fallout and an assortment of economic and social issues) was dismissed at the Pentagon, the New Yorker writer George Packer has reported, on the grounds that its assumptions were "too negative."

In "Battle Ready," the 2004 nonfiction book he did with Tom Clancy, General Zinni reflected that "in the lead-up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw, at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility; at worst, lying, incompetence and corruption." And given the general's outspoken comments in recent public appearances — he was one of the first in a widening circle of retired generals to call for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's resignation — the reader might well expect his new book, "The Battle for Peace" (written with Tony Koltz), to be peppered with lots of provocative, news-making observations.

It's not. General Zinni reiterates some of the criticisms he has voiced in speeches and interviews: at one point, comparing the wars in Iraq and Vietnam, he draws an analogy between the Gulf of Tonkin incident and Mr. Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. But for the most part he soft-pedals particular complaints about the administration's conduct of the war.

For instance, in writing about national security strategy, General Zinni sidesteps questions about the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive intervention, noting only that it has been "applied inconsistently and haphazardly." And in discussing the Pentagon's efforts to effect a "transformation" of the military, he does not delve into Mr. Rumsfeld's determination to streamline forces and his fateful decision to go to war in Iraq with far lower troop levels than many experts (including General Zinni) recommended.

The bulk of this book is willfully focused on the big picture — on long-term strategies for dealing with global crises and emerging threats. Although General Zinni manages to anchor his more abstract arguments in knowledge he has acquired on the ground — leading troops in Vietnam, commanding rescue operations in Somalia, heading a special operations section of the Marines, in addition to serving as Centcom commander and special envoy to the Middle East — he often leaves the reader wanting more specifics and more close analyses of situations he knows firsthand (like the one in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian standoff).

His central theory is that the world changed not on Sept. 11, 2001, but in 1989, with the end of the cold war, which created seismic changes (comparable to those left in the wakes of World War I and World War II) and a dangerous new environment of global instability. "We expected a new world order of peace and prosperity," he writes of the collapse of the Soviet Union. "We could not have been more wrong. Instead of global peace and prosperity, all the snakes came out, with consequences that are still unfolding."

Change and flux, he reminds us, accelerated in the closing decade of the 20th century and the opening years of the 21st. Globalization held out the promise of worldwide economic development but also threatened to increase economic inequalities and feelings of exploitation on the part of the third world. At the same time, old ideas of sovereignty were being challenged by a proliferation of "non-state entities" (like terrorist networks and drug cartels), while old ideas of nationalism were being challenged by religious, ethnic and tribal identities.

The real threats to the United States, General Zinni writes, come not from military forces or violent attacks; nor do they derive "from an ideology (not even from a radical, West-hating, violent brand of Islam)." Rather, they come from "instability and the chaos it generates," which, he says, will sooner or later "wash onto our shores."

As General Zinni sees it, the United States is not only slow to react to burgeoning problems around the world, waiting for crises to metastasize before taking action, but is also hobbled by an outmoded "governmental system, organizational structure and national strategy that had served admirably and successfully during the 50 years of cold war but had not evolved to adapt to the changes that swept in after its collapse."

In the course of this volume General Zinni offers some suggestions for remedying this situation: from forming "an integrating agency" that "would be responsible for monitoring unstable areas, destabilizing conditions and emerging threats" to creating more multilateral initiatives involving other countries, international agencies and nongovernmental organizations. Though many of these recommendations sound sensible and are articulated in clear, no-nonsense language, they are presented in only the sketchiest and most general terms.

"The Battle for Peace" feels, in the end, less like a full-scale analysis than a warning, a warning that deserves serious consideration, given General Zinni's Cassandra-like foresight on matters like Iraq.

With the end of the cold war, "violence may hit us — as it hit London in 2005, and as it hit us in 2001," he writes. "But the violence will not be a World War III knockout blow." Instead, there will be "hundreds of little" blows (ranging from terrorist attacks and global health epidemics to job losses and oil shortages), fueled by the growing instabilities of the world.

"We're now in the position of the man who slept with a cobra," he argues. "The cobra is gone. Now the room is full of bees. Could those bees kill him? Possibly. Possibly not." But they present the specter of a "death of a thousand stings."

Are We Really Going To Nuke Iran?

Decoding our options.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

What are we to make of Seymour Hersh's bombshell, in this week's New Yorker, that not only is President George W. Bush keen to attack Iran's nuclear facilities but that several higher-ups in the White House and the Pentagon would like to do so with nuclear weapons?

According to Hersh, an "option plan," presented this past winter by the Pentagon to the White House, calls for the use of B61-11 nuclear bunker-busters against Iran's underground sites, especially the Natanz facility, which houses the centrifuges needed to enrich uranium and which is reported to be dug 75 feet beneath the earth's surface. (If it really is that deep, and if Bush wanted to destroy it and not just disable its operations briefly, a non-nuclear bomb wouldn't be powerful enough.)

Hersh also reports that the Joint Chiefs of Staff tried to remove the nuclear option from "the evolving war plan for Iran," but the White House insisted on leaving it in. The chiefs will soon give Bush "a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran." Some officers are thinking about resigning if he rejects their views.

Is this for real? Is President Bush or anyone else in a position of power truly, seriously thinking about dropping nuclear bombs on a country that poses no direct threat to the United States, possesses no nuclear weapons of its own, and isn't likely to for at least a few years? Pre-emptive war—attacking a country to keep it from attacking us or an ally—is sometimes justifiable. Preventive war—attacking a country to keep it from developing a capability to attack an ally sometime in the future—almost never is. And preventive war waged with nuclear weapons is (not to put too fine a spin on it) crazy.

The only time the United States ever used nuclear weapons, in 1945, was at the end of a world war that had been raging for years. And at the time, the bombing was seen as an alternative to an invasion of the Japanese mainland that might have killed hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. In the 60 years since, the world has declared and observed a clear threshold between the use and nonuse of nuclear weapons. To violate that threshold—for a purpose that falls far short of pre-empting an imminent threat or protecting our national survival—would not only be immoral; it would incite outrage across the Middle East and the Muslim world; it would inspire vast recruitment drives by anti-American terrorists (and any resulting sequels to 9/11 would be seen, even by our friends, as just deserts); and it would legitimize nuclear weapons as everyday tools of warfare and spur many nations into building their own arsenals, if just to anticipate and match their neighbors' impending arsenals.

In short, it would be a disaster of head-spinning proportions.

So, again, is this for real? Are Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney really thinking about nuking Iran? If they're not, and assuming that Hersh's sources are good (as they usually are), what are these nuclear options, debates, and war plans all about? Here are a few possibilities:

The Madman Theory. In his first few years as president, Richard Nixon tried to force North Vietnam's leaders to the peace table by persuading them that he was a madman who would do anything to win the war. His first step, in October 1969, was to ratchet up the alert levels of U.S. strategic nuclear forces as a way of jarring the Soviet Union into pressuring the North Vietnamese to back down. A few years later, he stepped up the bombing of the North and put out the word that he might use nukes. In neither case did this ploy have any effect whatsoever. Nor is there much reason to believe it would make the Iranians shake in their boots. A Foreign Ministry spokesman in Tehran today returned the volley by dismissing the report as part of a "psychological war" campaign. The danger of this rhetorical escalation (if that's all it is) is that it can spin out of control. If Washington and Tehran are playing a game of global chicken (as I speculated last week), upping the stakes with nukes is like loading the front bumper with a barrel of dynamite and a crying baby.

The Madman Theory, Variation B. If Iran is immune to such pressures, our European allies might not be. Many of them already regard Bush as a religious zealot and Cheney as a warmonger. If they believe that the White House might really resolve the dispute with Iran by dropping nuclear bombs, they might suddenly start pushing for sanctions—a move they've stopped short of, mainly to protect their own trade relations with Tehran—as a comparatively moderate way of pressuring Iran to stop enriching uranium. Whether or not this is Bush's intent, there's evidence in Hersh's piece that the escalation might have the same effect. The Europeans, Hersh writes, are "rattled" by "their growing perception that Bush and Cheney believe a bombing campaign will be needed." He quotes one European diplomat as saying, "We need to find ways to impose sufficient costs to bring the [Iranian] regime to its senses. … I think if there is unity in opposition and the price imposed"—in sanctions—"is sufficient, [the Iranians] may back down."

Bureaucratic Politics. Nowhere does Hersh contend that Bush has decided to use nuclear weapons. He writes that the idea was in "one of the military's initial option plans" (not that it's part of some final plan), and that the White House won't take the option off the table (not that they've put it on the table). A debate is heating up, but it hasn't been settled. It is a long-standing practice for Washington insiders to use press leaks as a means of publicizing debates and rallying support for their positions. Hersh's main sources for this story—"current and former American military and intelligence officials"—are all opposed to the nuclear option. One source, "a Pentagon adviser on the war on terror," is quoted as saying that high-level support for using nukes is "a juggernaut that has to be stopped." The same source also says that "if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen." The Madman Theory presupposes that at least some of Hersh's sources are using him to disperse disinformation. The Bureaucratic Politics Theory posits that they're using him to promote one faction within the government. The two theories are not mutually exclusive; a mix of both might be operative.

The Three-Options Theory. Another possibility is that Bush is going to launch some sort of raid on Iran, and if people think he might drop nuclear bombs, they'll be relieved—they'll consider it a relatively moderate gesture—if he confines the attack to conventional bombs. It's a variation on the game that national-security advisers sometimes use in laying out options to their bosses. Option 1: Declare all-out war. Option 2: Surrender. Option 3 is the course of action that the adviser wants to pursue. Hersh's story might be serving the same purpose. Option 1: Nuke 'em. Option 2: Shut your eyes and do nothing, like the Europeans would prefer. Option 3: Attack Iran's facilities, but with 2,000-pound smart bombs, not 5-kiloton nuclear bombs.

Or … Or maybe there's no gamesmanship going on here, maybe Hersh is simply reporting on a nuclear war plan that President Bush is really, seriously considering, a "juggernaut" that might not be stopped. If it's as straightforward as that, we're in deeper trouble than most of us have imagined.