I have to think that this article underestimates the size, extent and diversity of the Iraqi 'resistance'. As does the US Occupation in its official propaganda (often even refusing to acknowledge the nature of the two more militarily successful factions of the resistance).
So a US strategy of terrorizing Fallujah and Sadr City and splitting them apart from their successful collaborations in attacking the US occupation seems like a strategy doomed to fail.
However, the US endgame is more ambitious. The endgame would appear to be--at least apparent to me since late last year--to break up Iraq into a weak confederation. The W. Sunna territory would be treated like a large W. Bank and Gaza Strip and (they hope) eventually beaten into a sister state of Jordan. The Kurdish territory would somehow be artificially united with enough oil production facilities to have a puppet state proper; however, investment there is highly speculative, because the north oil fields were not well maintained and are considered pretty much tapped out. The Kurds main economy would be something like Kharzai's Afghanistan was supposed to be: a safe territory for pipelines.
The Shia lands would be the new model Iraq (since, remember, according to the ziocon script, the bulk of the Shia all the way to Baghdad were going to see the Yanks and the Brits as liberators). In the Shia lands the idea was to liberalize oil production while reconstructing and politically and socially pacifying. The permanent US bases there (as in Kurdistan) would stay pretty much far away from most of the population, well out of sight.
This won't work, I PREDICT, because the ziocons have well and truly misunderstood Iraqis, underestimated their nationalism, ignored their contempt for the US-occupied Gulf States, forgot about their brotherandsisterhood with all of Palestine.
When the US Occupation floats the 'possibility of civil war', I'm not sure even they know what they mean. There is a civil war now: Iraqi patriots vs. USuk Occupation collaborators.
And this is the key to understanding how the mixed fighters of Fallujah and Sadr City, as the vanguard of the armed struggle against the Occupation, are right now trying to counter being hemmed in and destroyed. They will attack Allawi's National Guard and its recruiting efforts with whatever it takes to break the back, not of the US military, but its collaborators.
Moreover, US and allied efforts to use selective assassination of Sunna leaders while making it look like Shia are doing it aren't fooling the Resistance (based on what I could see from the underground net stuff).
Before the US troops 'cut the wire', I remember one ex-pat Iraqi saying to me in warning about the US invasion: He said, The invasion will succeed [though it took longer than many of us thought], the occupation will fail if the Americans plan to stay longer than 1-2 years. Continuing, he conjectured that if the Americans planned to stay longterm, there might even be hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis before the Americans and their zionist friends realize the mistake they made in ignoring Iraqi nationalism and Sunni and Shia unity in the face of an invasion. And , he added, neither Sunni or Shia will stand for permanent occupation, so without a timeline for leaving, the resistance will just grow (counter to what so many Americans keep saying, that if you give a timeline for leaving, you strengthen the resistance).
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