US options in curbing Iraqi attacks

FROM a military standpoint, hunkering down might not help. The hotel hit by rockets on Sunday, killing a US officer, was within a secure area, after all. What's needed is more pressure, to disrupt plans. Many retired officers say that more US troops are needed, to mount more patrols. But others note that more US troops equal more targets - and that the first problem is not to find the enemy, but to figure out who he is and what motivates him.

There are hints that some of the suicide bombers who struck throughout Baghdad on Sunday were foreign terrorists, and not remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime. But the truth is that some six months after the fall of Baghdad, the US still doesn't really know who it's up against.

"We're trying to determine the nature of who these people were," said President Bush at his Tuesday press conference.

Intelligence resources might be better deployed. A recent report from the Center for Army Lessons Learned noted that the Army has 69 tactical human intelligence teams in the country - 15 fewer than needed. Those in place were producing far fewer reports than expected, the reported said.

Iraq's own intelligence capability might be reconstituted. Iraqis themselves could prove more capable of penetrating anti-US cells than US personnel have been.

"We are thinking seriously of having an intelligence organization," Hoshyar Zabari, foreign minister of the Iraqi Governing Council, told a Brookings Institution audience earlier this month. "You cannot run a country without an intelligence operation to identify all the sources of ... threats."

Intelligence has begun flowing in at a faster rate, according to Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division in Iraq.

More and more tips are coming in every day, said General Odierno in a videoconference with Washington-based reporters.

"It is probably 10- or 20-fold more than when we first started here ... the number of people we have coming in to provide us human information," he said.

The information is also far more useful, about 90 percent accurate, said Odierno. Intelligence indicates that the amounts of money being paid by insurgent leaders to those willing to attack Americans has skyrocketed, from $100 this spring to $1,000 to $5,000. That inflation shows that fewer people are willing to come forward, said Odierno.

The armed services are working on new technologies that might help soon, such as new methods of fusing information gathered by unmanned Air Force drones with other sensors. But Odierno said that his highest priority was a technology that would allow him to jam or prematurely explode the improvised bombs being used against his troops.

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