Look, while it's true that some Iraqis are waiting for it to get safer before they turn in insurgents, I say many if not most insurgents are Iraqis with lots of sympathy.

Iraqi insurgents: 1) Sunni muslims, esp. Iraqi armed forces which have been noted by the Administration as coordinating & fostering attacks. These are a minority, but they aren't insubstantial in number, they aren't foreigners and they aren't going away. 2) Extremist Iraqis who believe the US is decadent and power-hungry and in any case know it isn't muslim. To figure out how many of these there are, take the number of Timothy McVeigh supporters in the United States and multiply by a factor of 10. 3) Kurds who are afraid the new government isn't going to give them what they want. 4) Iraqis who want revenge that we have killed their people and invaded their country and who are marginally interested in one or more of the other 3 reasons. You can bet that these 4 groups - did i miss any? - represent a substantial number of insurgents. As things continue to be horribly dangerous and impoverished, the insurgents will be able to recruit new folks. That's why talk about how it's going to get better makes me queasy...how long? How many more dead soldiers? How much money?

What to do about it now? Wow. More cops on the ground. Less qualms about where they come from e.g., if they're French. Put more money in and hope that fewer lives are lost. Beg for help on any terms - it's not our country, it needs help, we need out.

Police work brings in terrorists. War has provided them with targets. The argument that we're better off having terrorists kill soldiers than having them hit us here strikes me as irresponsible for several reasons - the main one being there's nothing about boys dying in Iraq that stops bin Laden from whatever operations he wants to carry out! It was 10 years between the last Trade Center attack and this one. They've killed so many more over there than we could have dreamed of losing here. The possibility of another hit along the lines of 911 magnitude seems remote. Smaller hits - the same kinds we're getting in Iraq - seem likely to me. The only reason they're not hitting us here is they don't want to renew sympathy or upset the current picture. The current picture works well for terrorism: ineffecitve war, ineffective peace, muslims rallying against an invader, effort and resources diverted from police action.

Long-term violent discontent in Iraq was a clear possibility from the beginning. War in Iraq was a bad idea given the threat picture. There was no Clear and Present Danger. What danger there was may have been answerable by intel and measured response. Instead, the fear machine was turned on and we jumped into a neat war with a messy messy peace.

I suspect that the composition of the insurgency is heavily, heavily foreign. And I think most military people would agree that they are "hard targets," and it's better for them to be fighting this rather than dealing with it in shopping malls in the U.S.--mostly because soldiers and Marines can shoot back. Unless we're going to issue M16s to young mothers (which I would love, but I believe I'm in the minority).

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