Insurgency fights on despite blows, new government

~ The prime minister will present a 28-point national reconciliation plan to parliament today.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The new Iraqi government should have been basking in the glow of a two-week blitz of good news.

Violence had eased significantly in the Iraqi capital from a security crackdown that blanketed the chaotic city with 75,000 U.S.-backed Iraqi soldiers. President Bush paid a surprise visit to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in a show of support for the Iraqi government.

Most dramatically, al-Qaida in Iraq lost its leader when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- the brutal terrorism boss -- was killed by a U.S. airstrike.

But insurgents have counterattacked, scuffing the sheen of progress.

By week's end al-Maliki's government was forced to declare a state of emergency and shoo its citizens off Baghdad's streets with two hours' notice after the tenacious insurgency took the offensive Friday along Haifa Street, just blocks from Iraq's seat of government.

Two days earlier, one of the defense lawyers for Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants was kidnapped from his home by men wearing Interior Ministry uniforms and flashing genuine-looking credentials. He was found slain in Sadr City, Baghdad's Shiite Slum -- the third defense attorney to be murdered since the trial started.

On Tuesday, the bodies of two captured American soldiers were recovered -- beheaded and surrounded by explosive devices. And al-Zarqawi's successor, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, said he conducted the slayings.

More than a dozen other U.S. soldiers or Marines died last week. Four American soldiers died Friday, including three killed by roadside bombs in separate attacks in Baghdad and another who died in a noncombat incident. The latest deaths were on Saturday, when a bomb killed two U.S. soldiers patrolling south of Baghdad.

Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at Rand Corp., said the good news side of the balance sheet, when seen as a whole, is a "significant step forward, at least in the immediate sense."

"But the facts on the ground have not really changed one iota. It was just one brick in the wall," he said. The al-Zarqawi killing "was decisive, but the rest of the machine remains intact."

In recent months, the Bush administration increasingly has acknowledged that it will be years before Iraq is a truly stable and democratic nation. But that goal, at present, appears to be receding even as progress is made against the Sunni-dominated insurgency that has killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers and thousands of Iraqis.

Criminal gangs and sectarian militias are rapidly filling a security vacuum created by the lack of a trustworthy police force. The Interior Ministry, a Shiite-run agency that controls police forces, is rife with militiamen bent on revenge killings, shakedowns and kidnapping for ransom.

"Sectarian and ethnic violence has come to rival the insurgency in terms of casualties and the threat it poses to political, social and economic progress in Iraq," security analyst Anthony H. Cordesman writes in an advance copy of a book he is writing at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"There is less and less difference between insurgency and civil war, and all sides are to some extent guilty of terrorism," he says.

Since losing the dominance they enjoyed until the ouster of Saddam Hussein, Sunni Arabs have been the driving force behind the insurgency, and Iraqi and American leaders are trying to draw them into politics in hopes of weakening support for the uprising.

Al-Maliki is to present a 28-point national reconciliation plan to parliament today setting out steps for preparing Iraqi forces to take control of Iraq's security and outlining an amnesty program for insurgents not involved in major bloodshed, a key politician said.

The proposal also promises to review the country's new constitution to address Sunni Arab demands and try to find a way to disband militias blamed for worsening sectarian bloodshed, according to a draft of the plan obtained earlier this week by The Associated Press and a description of the latest version by Kurdish politician Mahmoud Othman.

Shortly after taking office May 20, al-Maliki vowed to take over security issues from American and other foreign troops in all of Iraq's 18 provinces within 18 months.

Neighborhoods in Baghdad and throughout the country are increasingly under the control of Shiite or Sunni militias, imposing their will on residents and forcing out those who are in the minority or don't toe an often fundamentalist Islamic line.

Still, there has been progress in pacifying Iraq and establishing a modicum of democracy, leaving some experts to say U.S. success is a 50-50 proposition right now.

"In short," Cordesman writes, "the odds of insurgent success are at best even."

To better its odds, he says, Washington "will have to slow its plans to reduce its military presence, adjust to new threats and intensify its efforts to reshape effective security and police forces."