BAGHDAD — Week by week, the guerrillas take their toll, killing Americans singly and in pairs, seeking to draw enough blood to undermine U.S. resolve to remain in Iraq.
Yet though the resistance has shown improved organization in the nearly three months since President Bush declared major combat over, it has failed to expand the scope of its onslaught, U.S. military strategists say. In an effort to crush the guerrilla forces before they expand into a broader movement, senior defense officials have crafted an updated profile of the enemy and a plan for dealing with it.
Pentagon strategists say they're gaining a clearer picture of the resistance: The attackers are largely confined to the "Sunni triangle" of central Iraq, failing to draw in the nation's majority Shiite Muslim population. They're increasingly sophisticated, probably several thousand strong -- including impoverished mercenaries who will kill an American for $1,000 -- and well armed. One recent raid netted 11,000 rocket-propelled grenades.
The solution, according to Gen. John Abizaid, the new chief of the U.S. Central Command, is to involve Iraqis more closely in gleaning intelligence from sources on the guerrillas and then to send in a lighter, more agile force to find the fighters. And above all: Capture or kill Saddam Hussein.
U.S. military strategists acknowledge that they'll have to act fast to halt a guerrilla campaign that is increasingly desperate.
"I think as we make political progress here we'll see more violence, more desperation for a time, and it's the nature of the enemy that we're fighting. So we shouldn't underestimate how hard they might fight," Abizaid told reporters in Baghdad on Sunday. "And they don't think we have the staying power to stick around."
He spoke hours after guerrillas opened up on a U.S. convoy with small arms and rocket- propelled grenade fire, killing two soldiers. The attack occurred in Tall Afar, about 200 miles northwest of Baghdad and far north of central Iraq, the epicenter of the recent attacks.
The attack brought to 151 the number of U.S. soldiers killed by hostile fire since the war began March 20, eclipsing the 147 killed during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Testing the U.S. tolerance for casualties is a strategy that Hussein once openly advocated, citing the 1993 U.S. pullout from Somalia following the deaths of 18 soldiers in two bloody days chronicled in the book and film "Black Hawk Down." Yet the American public's tolerance for casualties appears to have risen since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and there have been no massive strikes against U.S. forces here.
"Unless the Shiites -- which, after all, are more than 60% of Iraq's people -- turn against the U.S., then we're talking about a localized threat which is still limited in terms of capability and experience," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a former senior Pentagon official and military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
After months of Pentagon denials that the attackers were organized enough to merit the description, the U.S. military appears to have accepted them as guerrillas, a term Abizaid first used last week. The group consists of disgruntled mid-level leaders from Hussein's now- banned Baath Party, Islamic extremists imported from Syria and elsewhere and terrorists drawn to American targets, Abizaid said.
The assailants, believed to include former intelligence officials, paramilitary fighters from Fedayeen Saddam and other Hussein loyalists, have made their goal obvious, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said during a visit to Iraq on Sunday: "Their aim is to restore the old regime."
The attacks are inspired but apparently not directed by Hussein, senior defense officials said. Just as his ability to elude capture has taunted U.S. forces, his apprehension would demoralize the growing movement.
"It's important even to know if he's alive or dead; and if he's alive, it's important either to capture or kill him," Abizaid said.
Two factors make the insurgents formidable, said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and former Marine who recently talked with U.S. military commanders in Iraq. The onetime regime leaders believed to be behind the attacks are desperate to avoid the retribution of fellow Iraqis, he said, and "they have lots of resources." These include the millions of dollars that have been buried or left around the country, and ample caches of arms.
"This place is a treasure trove of weapons," Reed said. "So if you have treasure, and you have weapons, and you have a motive, you're dangerous. And that's what I think we're seeing."
