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In the first phase of the war, cluster bombs were the weapon of choice, and so the United States won. Now we have moved into the phase where the dominant weapon is the truck bomb and that levels the playing field. A classic guerrilla war is taking shape in Iraq and such wars are a contest not of technology, but will.

In this sort of struggle, guerrillas have several inbuilt advantages. They are at home, among friends and relatives, with all the local knowledge (starting with language) that the foreign troops lack. They can wrap themselves in the local flag (or increasingly, in the case of the non-Baathist resistance in Iraq, in the green banner of Islam), options that are simply unavailable to the occupying forces.

And there is something more: The occupiers have to build; the resistance only has to destroy.

There is a key concept of revolutionary guerrilla warfare that has, oddly, no standard translation in English: la politique du pire. Literally, it is the strategy of (making things) worse.

The idea is that the guerrillas, who lack the military strength to beat their opponents in open battle, should concentrate instead on destroying the structures and services on which the population depends.

If their attacks and sabotage make the lives of ordinary people awful, the people will not blame the guerrillas. They will blame the authorities whose duty it is to provide those structures and services � the occupation authorities, in this case.

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The U.S. is already having immense difficulty in persuading other countries to send troops to Iraq to share the burden of the occupation, because, in addition to their original misgivings about the wisdom and legality of the invasion, they now have to worry about a significant toll of casualties.

All the more is this true of international organizations.

For all the rhetoric that ricochets around Washington about building democracy in Iraq like the U.S. and its allies built German and Japanese democracy after World War II, this is an administration that does everything on the cheap, and there is no Marshall Plan in the offing.

On the contrary, the Bush administration was hoping to pay much of the cost of the occupation out of Iraqi oil exports (which is why pipelines are being attacked), and to unload a lot more onto the U.N. and the alphabet soup of humanitarian aid organizations that generally follow in its wake.

It was never likely that the U.N. would let itself be used in that way: The mistrust of U.S. motives and tactics goes too deep in a lot of the members.

Gwynne Dyer, The Toronto Star

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Yesterday's bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad was the latest evidence that America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one.

Of course, we should be glad that the Iraq war was swifter than even its proponents had expected, and that a vicious tyrant was removed from power. But the aftermath has been another story. America has created � not through malevolence but through negligence � precisely the situation the Bush administration has described as a breeding ground for terrorists: a state unable to control its borders or provide for its citizens' rudimentary needs.

For example, the American commander in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid, has described the almost daily attacks on his troops as guerrilla campaigns carried out by Baathist remnants with little public support. Yet an increasing number of Iraqis disagree: they believe that the attacks are being carried out by organized forces � motivated by nationalism, Islam and revenge � that feed off public unhappiness.

According to a survey this month by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, nearly half of the Iraqis polled attribute the violence to provocation by American forces or resistance to the occupation (even more worrisome, the Arabic word for "resistance" used in the poll implies a certain amount of sympathy for the perpetrators). In the towns of Ramadi and Falluja, where many of the recent attacks have taken place, nearly 90 percent of respondents attributed the attacks to these causes.

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As bad as the situation inside Iraq may be, the effect that the war has had on terrorist recruitment around the globe may be even more worrisome. Even before the coalition troops invaded, a senior United States counterterrorism official told reporters that "an American invasion of Iraq is already being used as a recruitment tool by Al Qaeda and other groups." Intelligence officials in the United States, Europe and Africa say that the recruits they are seeing now are younger than in the past. Television images of American soldiers and tanks in Baghdad are deeply humiliating to Muslims, even those who didn't like Saddam Hussein, explained Saad al-Faqih, head of Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, a Saudi dissident group in London. He told me that some 3,000 young Saudis have entered Iraq in recent months, and called the war "a gift to Osama bin Laden."

Hassan Nasrallah, head of the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, told a crowd of 150,000 in a March religious observance that the United States was trying to create a "tragedy for humanity and to spread chaos in the world" and predicted that the people of Iraq and the region would "welcome American troops with rifles, blood, arms, martyrdom."

The occupation has given disparate groups from various countries a common battlefield on which to fight a common enemy. Hamid Mir, a biographer of Osama bin Laden, has been traveling in Iraq and told me that Hezbollah has greatly stepped up its activities not only in Shiite regions but also in Baghdad.

Most ominously, Al Qaeda's influence may be growing. It has been linked to attacks as far apart as Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Morocco. One suspect in yesterday's attack is Ansar al-Islam, a Qaeda offshoot whose camps in Northern Iraq were destroyed early in the war. In recent weeks American officials acknowledged that members of the group had slipped into Iraq from Iran, had begun organizing in Baghdad and were suspected of plotting bombings, including the Aug. 7 attack on the Jordanian Embassy. In addition, Mr. Mir reported that Al Qaeda was carving out new training grounds in the border region between Iraq and Syria.

Jessica Stern, The New York Times

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Is this where all of us opposed to the war are supposed to apologise for ever doubting the Bushies?

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Let me tell you what else I'm worried about: I'm worried about an opponent who uses nation building and the military in the same sentence. See, our view of the military is for our military to be properly prepared to fight and win war and, therefore, prevent war from happening in the first place.

From a Washington Post story.

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