And, the administration argues, U.S. forces handed a strategic defeat in April to both Shiite and Sunni Muslim insurgents, forcing them to lower their sights. Rather than confronting U.S. forces, those insurgents have turned to bombing Iraqi infrastructure and attempting to assassinate leaders of the new Iraqi government.
"They now cannot defeat us on the battlefield, so they are changing their tactics," the official said.
Yet one of the biggest problems for U.S. military and intelligence officials remains the paucity of hard intelligence about the structure of the insurgency.
For example, when Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked recently during Senate testimony whether the Iraqi insurgency was being coordinated from a central hub, he responded: "The intelligence community, as far as I know, will not ... give you an answer, because they can't give me an answer."
Military experts point out that a counterinsurgency is the most difficult type of war to wage. With the exception of the successful British effort in Malaya in the 1950s, history is littered with examples of unsuccessful counterinsurgency strategies carried out by great powers. As the French learned in Algeria in the 1950s, the United States in Vietnam a decade later and the British in Northern Ireland, the most difficult part of any such operation is to separate the insurgents from the civilians from whom they draw strength. This, some top Pentagon officials say, has been one of the U.S. military's difficulties in Iraq.
"The hope that the Iraqi people, upon having Saddam [Hussein] deposed, would step forward enthusiastically and embrace this new opportunity, turned out to be more optimistic than it should have been," Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told Congress.
"That, I think, has led to the opportunity for the terrorists then to be able to operate without fear of being exposed by the population."
The three-week desert war during the spring of 2003, ending in the collapse of Hussein's regime, vindicated the idea that a small U.S. ground force, combined with billions of dollars worth of military technology, could make quick work of a larger, yet hollow, enemy army. It was a conventional war that the U.S. military had trained and been equipped for since emerging from the jungles of Vietnam three decades ago; a strategy executed with success during Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
