US fights shifting Iraqi foes

A month ago, suicide car-bombings appeared to be Iraq's greatest security problem. In recent weeks, there's been a sharp spike in targeted assassinations of both foreigners and locals - including a failed attempt Sunday on Iraq's minister of public works - working with the coalition. And in recent days, firefights and roadside bombs have been on the rise again.

Nothing does more to bring home the multifaceted nature of the US-led coalition's enemies in Iraq than the welter of methods, ideologies, and targets. Despite coalition successes against the insurgency - particularly fighters close to Saddam Hussein's Baath regime - attacks persist. Coalition officials expect them to only increase as June 30, the day US has set for handing over sovereignty to the Governing Council, approaches.

Analysts say one of the crucial lessons of the continued fighting is that the strongest military in the world, no matter how well-trained or well-led, cannot end the resistance in an Arab nation where the political stakes are so high and latent anger against foreign powers so great.

It's a point that coalition officials agree with, and they're pinning their hopes on the handover as the start of a political process that will get buy-in from almost all Iraqi groups and convince the nation's Sunni Arabs, the minority who've ruled Iraq since at least the Ottoman Empire, that they won't lose out in a democracy that will see Iraq's Shiites, who make up about 60 percent of the population, take the lion's share of power.

"In my experience of wars like this, it really isn't possible to suppress these sorts of attacks militarily," says Col. Patrick Lang, a retired Army officer who served as head of human intelligence and head of Middle East and terrorism intelligence for the Department of Defense in the 1990s, and is now in the private sector. "You need a political solution to this kind of violence, one that doesn't just simply leave the Shia in charge."

For now, the US military is staying focused on the insurgents. Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling, assistant division commander of the 1st Armored Division and head of security in and around Baghdad, sees four threats: [Editor's note: The original version incorrectly stated Hertling's rank and unit.]

Terrorist cells set up and encouraged by Saddam Hussein; Iraqi Sunni Islamists seeking to set up an Islamic state here, but whose objectives are largely national, rather than pan-Islamic, in scope; foreign fighters, many inspired or financed by Al Qaeda, seeking both to strike at their great enemy the US and simultaneously advance the cause of an Islamic superstate arcing across the Middle East; and local criminals, who provide weapons and support to some or all of the above.

General Hertling and his intelligence chief, Lt. Col. Ken Devan, say they've made the most progress against fighters linked to Hussein.

Colonel Devan says the 14 Baath cells in and around Baghdad have been "significantly disrupted" by dozens of arrests and interrogations, increasing cooperation from Iraqi civilians, and an operation late last year - dubbed Iron Hammer - that aggressively sought to destroy safe houses and arrest mid-level couriers and financiers. A similar pattern of success against Baathists has been described by commanders from Tikrit, the former strongman's hometown, to Mosul in the north.

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