The Pentagon's assessment appeared at odds with those of Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of coalition ground forces, who told the New York Times he had decided to limit the scope of the raids because of growing signs they were alienating Iraqis.

Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon's acting spokesman and a close aide to US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, insisted that the shift in tactics merely reflected the increasing sophistication of US military operations.

"The notion is that in those cases where we have to conduct a more traditional raid, we will do so," he said.

"In those cases where it is possible to act in a more sophisticated fashion, we will do that as well, either because we have better intelligence or because we understand the environment better," he said.

Both Di Rita and Lieutenant General Norton Schwartz, the operations director of the Joint Staff, said the aggressive raids and patrolling were having a positive impact on the security situation overall despite the ebb and flow of attacks.

On Thursday, a car bomb killed 11 people at the Jordanian embassy, a fierce gun battle erupted on a busy street in Baghdad, and two more US soldiers were killed late Wednesday in another Baghdad firefight.

The latest deaths raised to 55 the number of US troops killed by hostile fire in the 99 days since US President George W. Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq.

But Schwartz said the number of attacks on US forces have declined "some" over the past three or four weeks from a peak of 40 a day.

"And whether that is symptomatic of a major shift, my personal read is that this is a result of offensive operations, of our commanders in the field ... who are engaging both mid-level Baathists and the Fedayeen and others actively," he said.

He said nearly 70 former Fedayeen fighters, including several generals and field grade officers, were captured over the past week in an operation called Victory Bounty.

Coalition forces have been conducting 2,000 patrols a day and hundreds of night patrols.

"The daily raids and patrols that our troops conduct every day are steadily and deliberately building a more stable and secure Iraq," he said.

In an interview with the Times, however, Sanchez said the military had virtually exhausted the gains from the aggressive raids.

"It was a fact that I started to get multiple indicators that maybe our iron-fisted approach to the conduct of ops was beginning to alienate Iraqis," he was quoted as saying. "I started to get those sensings from multiple sources, all the way from the Governing Council down to average people."

Di Rita, however, said: "We believe we're having effect and the generals on the ground believe they're having an effect. And, oh, by the way, the governing council and the people on whom we rely for different kinds of insights inside of Iraq believe they're having effect."

They said there was no indication that armed resistance to coalition forces was moving beyond a core of former Baathists and Fedayeen fighters loyal to Saddam Hussein to a larger population of Iraqis.

"There's been an awful lot of indication to the contrary," Di Rita said. "There's an awful lot of general public sentiment that while there's a lot of difficulty, things are getting better."

WAR.WIRE