From The Associated Press, 5/4/05:
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-iraq-tackling-the-insurgency,0,5528495.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines

No Sign of U.S. Strategy Vs. Insurgents

By JAMIE TARABAY
Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq --

Iraq's insurgency is roaring back to life with a series of deadly
attacks aimed at crippling the country's new government and forcing a
U.S. pullout.

The government, meanwhile, is wracked by infighting, with its security
forces still in training and no sign of a strategy to deal with the
growing violence.

Militants may have been emboldened by the vacuum left while Iraq's
first democratically elected representatives spent three months
jockeying for power and struggling to form a government, officials
concede.

But even with that government at last in place, top officials say they
have neither the forces nor the accurate intelligence necessary to
quell the insurgency.

"They are an underground network of people and they are willing to
die," said Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari.

"They hate life. They want to kill as many people as possible."

He added that they don't use identifiable locations.

"You can't overrun them by taking over whole sections of the country."

Like many senior Iraqi officials -- and much of the citizenry --
Zebari believes the insurgents are mostly foreigners like Jordanian
militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other Islamic fundamentalists.

Others, including the U.S. military, believe members of the Sunni Arab
minority with ties to the former regime are primarily responsible for
recruiting, funding and carrying out the violence.

Shifting the blame on outsiders, though, avoids fanning sectarian
hatred in the Shiite-dominated country, which the government claims is
one of the insurgents' goals.

Another goal is the withdrawal of U.S. troops and their allies.

In an audiotape released Friday, al-Zarqawi warned President Bush that
he and his militants would "not rest while your army is here, as long
as there is a pulse in our veins."

An intelligence official in Washington said the tape appeared genuine.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said
last month that Iraq's insurgency remained undiminished in its
capabilities.

"And where they are right now is where they were almost a year ago,"
he said at a Pentagon news conference.

The Iraqi government could increase its credibility by negotiating a
departure date for U.S. and other foreign troops.

But Iraqi officials, unable to crush the insurgency on their own, have
said the time is not right for the Americans to leave.

"We never hear any official in Iraq make a verbal call to the
Americans to declare an end to their presence in Iraq ... It's the
duty of the government to assert its independence," said Diaa Rashwan,
an expert on radical Islam at Egypt's Al-Ahram Center for Political
and Strategic Studies.

"To keep silent complicates the situation and gives more motivation to
the resistance."

Meanwhile the U.S. military has been pushing barely trained Iraqi
security forces to the fore, while easing back some of its front-line
forces to the cover of heavily fortified military bases.

According to statistics compiled by the Brookings Institution in
Washington, insurgents had killed 616 Iraqi police officers this year
through Monday.

Militants are using increasingly sophisticated methods of hitting at
units when they venture out, and their aim is to hit as hard as they
can at the United States to make it impossible for the troops to stay.

But for U.S. troops to pull out, Iraq's government must be able to go
it alone.

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Can you say "Vietnam"?

Harry