Washington ? Americans are dying almost daily in Iraq more than two months after President Bush declared that major combat had ended, and many people believe the anti-occupation violence will persist — or even grow — as long as Iraqis think Saddam Hussein might return.

The resistance, which one U.S. general said Monday had become more sophisticated, has been so persistent that plans for sending U.S. troops home have been thrown in doubt.

U.S. officials have responded by putting more U.S. troops on the offensive in pursuit of former Baath Party leaders and other Saddam loyalists, and by escalating the psychological battle for the hearts and minds of ordinary Iraqis who think Saddam might re-emerge.

One approach is to repeat over and over the assertion that Saddam’s reign has ended. Lawrence Di Rita, a spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, made that point Monday.

“There’s going to be more violence and other setbacks, there’s no question about that,” he said. “But make no mistake: Saddam Hussein’s regime is gone and it is not coming back.”

In a similar vein, the top U.S. administrator in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, announced Monday that Iraq’s currency, the dinar, would be replaced with new money that did not feature Saddam’s image.

Still, Saddam’s shadow lingers.

Last week the Arab television network al-Jazeera aired an audiotape of Saddam that CIA analysts say was probably authentic. It was said to have been recorded June 14; if true it would mean Saddam survived the war and may be directing the insurgency.

In Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, someone recently wrote graffiti on a wall of one of his former palaces offering praise for the former president, and no Iraqi has been bold enough to erase it.

An Iraqi raises his hands in a mock surrender as a U.S. soldier stops the traffic at a mobile checkpoint in Kadhamiya, north of the capital Baghdad, Iraq. Hours earlier on Monday a U.S. convoy was attacked in Kadhamiya, and a U.S. soldier was killed.

Last week, the U.S. government put a $25 million bounty on Saddam’s head, and offered $15 million for each of his sons, Odai and Qusai.

Emad Dhia, an Iraqi-American who returned to his homeland after the war to advise the occupation administration, told reporters Monday at the Pentagon that attacks on Americans would not stop “as long as Saddam’s remnants exist.” He added: “They will stop at nothing to regain their power.”

In Dhia’s view, most ordinary Iraqis despise Saddam and are eager to put the past behind them, although the audiotape that surfaced last week was not helpful.

“It will inflict more fear in some of (the) Iraqi people’s hearts and minds,” Dhia said.

Michael O’Hanlon, a defense expert at the Brookings Institution, thinks that questions about the fate of Saddam are not the main problem facing the U.S.-led occupation forces.

“The most important issue is simply that there are a lot of former Baath Party people who have no interest in cooperating with a new Iraqi government” whether Saddam is around or not, he said.

O’Hanlon thinks an Iraqi insurgency could develop more readily from frustration at the slow pace of economic and political reconstruction than a fear of Saddam returning.

Anthony Cordesman, an expert on the Iraqi military and an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wonders how long the United States can “sit on a hostile Iraq” without addressing the reasons many Iraqis feel alienated by the American occupation and without making it clearer to ordinary Iraqis how they will regain control of their country.

“The administration failed to create any clear plans for conflict-resolution” and underestimated the level of resistance once Saddam was toppled, he said.

U.S. military authorities say they have no good evidence that Saddam was killed in the war, but they also doubt he is orchestrating the wave of attacks on Americans.