AP: Analysis: Iraq Insurgency Fights On ~ ~~ (They expected it to stop immediately?)

The new Iraqi government and its American patrons should have been basking in the glow of a two-week blitz of good news.

Violence had eased significantly in the Iraqi capital from a security crackdown that blanketed the chaotic city with 75,000 U.S.-backed Iraqi soldiers.

President Bush paid a surprise visit to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in a show of support for an Iraqi government that emerged from an agonizing six-month birth.

Most dramatically, al-Qaida in Iraq lost its leader when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - the brutal terrorism boss - was killed by a U.S. air strike.

By week's end al-Maliki's government was forced to declare a state of emergency and shoo its citizens off Baghdad's streets with two hours notice after the tenacious insurgency took the offensive Friday along Haifa Street, just blocks from Iraq's seat of government.

Two days earlier, one of the defense lawyers for Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants was kidnapped from his home by men wearing Interior Ministry uniforms and flashing genuine-looking credentials. He was found slain in Sadr City, Baghdad's Shiite Slum - the third defense attorney to be murdered since the trial started.

On Tuesday, the bodies of two captured American soldiers were recovered - beheaded and surrounded by booby traps. And al-Zarqawi's successor, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, said he conducted the brutal slayings.

At least 13 other U.S. soldiers or Marines died in combat or insurgent bombings in a particularly bloody week for the military.

Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at Rand Corp., said the good news side of the balance sheet, when seen as a whole, is a "significant step forward, at least in the immediate sense."

"But the facts on the ground have not really changed one iota. It was just one brick in the wall. It (the al-Zarqawi killing) was decisive, but the rest of the machine (al-Qaida in Iraq) remains intact," he said in telephone interview.

In recent months, the Bush administration increasingly has acknowledged that it will be years before Iraq is a truly stable and democratic nation. But that goal, at present, appears to be receding even as progress is made against the Sunni-dominated insurgency that has killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers and thousands of Iraqis.

Criminal gangs and sectarian militias are rapidly filling a security vacuum created by the lack of a trustworthy police force. The Interior Ministry, a Shiite-run agency that controls police forces, is rife with militiamen bent on revenge killings, shakedowns and kidnapping for ransom.

"Sectarian and ethnic violence has come to rival the insurgency in terms of casualties and the threat it poses to political, social and economic progress in Iraq," security analyst Anthony H. Cordesman writes in an advance copy of a book he is writing at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"There is less and less difference between insurgency and civil war, and all sides are to some extent guilty of terrorism," he says.

The breakdown of civil conventions and trust impose a fundamental and nearly unbearable strain on the Iraqi people. Their misery was detailed in a recent confidential memo from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to the State Department.

The collection of anecdotes from Iraqi workers in an undisclosed office in the embassy painted an extraordinarily bleak picture of life in the capital, where local employees do not dare reveal where they work, even to family members, for fear of retribution.

"Employees all share a common tale: of nine employees in March, only four had family members who knew they worked at the embassy. Iraqi colleagues who are called after hours often speak in Arabic as an indication they cannot speak openly in English," the memo said.

"Although our staff retain a professional demeanor, strains are apparent. We see their personal fears are reinforcing divisive sectarian or ethnic channels. Employees are apprehensive enough that we fear they may exaggerate developments or steer us toward news that comports with their own world view. Objectivity, civility, and logic that make for a functional workplace may falter if social pressures outside the Green Zone don't abate."

Neighborhoods in Baghdad and throughout the country are increasingly under the control of Shiite or Sunni militias, imposing their will on residents and forcing out those who are in the minority or don't toe an often fundamentalist Islamic line.

Still, there has been progress in pacifying Iraq and establishing a modicum of democracy, leaving some experts to say U.S. success is a 50-50 proposition right now.

To better its odds, he says, Washington "will have to slow its plans to reduce its military presence, adjust to new threats and intensify its efforts to reshape effective security and police forces."

That will test the mettle of the Bush administration with its Republican allies facing a midterm congressional election in four months and voters increasingly uneasy about the war.

Analysis is important.

We've got two similar Al Qaeda-in-Iraq events post-Zarqawi:
1. The capture and killing of 2 U.S. soldiers, and
2. The capture and killing of 4 Russian diplomats.

In both instances, the hostages were only held by the enemy momentarily.

Further, the bodies of the U.S. soldiers (as well as the approaches to them) were booby-trapped.

This tells us that Al Qaeda no longer has a secure means of moving foreign funds...as none of the hostages were ransomed.

It also tells us that Al Qaeda is unable to fully exploit their brutality with videos, agonizing hostage phone-calls, etc.

In short, it tells us that Al Qaeda is very weak right now.

But it also shows that Al Qaeda still has experienced field veterans alive and motivated. Placing IEDS and rigging bodies with explosives is not something performed by the guy who decides on a whim to rob a bank or rape a girl and then dispose of the body.

Al Qaeda has set off at least 1 car bomb made post-Zarqawi, and has exploded another suicide bomber (at an old folks home...just killed the bomber and 1 already-dying retiree).

So Al Qaeda still has some limited access to munitions, as well as the above-mentioned experienced field veterans.

But U.S. fatality rates have sharply dropped in Iraq post-Zarqawi.

Likewise, the promised post-Zarqawi revenge attack by Al Qaeda against us has, as expected, failed to happen ("We'll avenge Zarqawi and make the ground shake to awake you" or some such ridiculous bluster circa June 10th).

Al Qaeda is still able to cobble together operations against soft targets (e.g. Saddam Hussein's attorneys, buses of civilian factory workers, etc.), but unable to mount any militarily meaningful counter-attacks.

Taken in sum, this is not a "Hydra" as the effeminate, hyper-pacifist left-wing reporters would wish...but rather the above is indicative of small surviving cells...

...organized still at the local level, but uncoordinated and uncommanded at any higher echelon.

Note also two things about Al Qaeda's global leadership:
1. It took a fair amount of time for Zawahiri to get his post-Zarqawi video out of Afghanistan, and
2. Al Qaeda seems to recognize the *need* but seems unable to securely communicate with the surviving Al Qaeda-in-Iraq cells.

I for one would be surprised if any Iraqi resistance outside of Ramadi can muster as many of 40 shooters at this point.

27 million people in Iraq, yet Al Qaeda can't make a show of force of more than 40 people in any one place.

...not exactly a "popular" war any longer for them, a point well worth chewing on.

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