On March 11, yet another U.S. soldier was killed and two more injured when a homemade bomb went off in Baquoba in central Iraq, bringing the U.S. death toll in the country since the invasion a year ago to 554.

Earlier, on March 1, the guerrillas dramatically demonstrated the failure of U.S. forces to destroy or contain them when they slaughtered more than 180 people at Shiite religious ceremonies in Karbala and Baghdad. On March 11, Paul Bremer, America's chief administrator in Iraq, admitted that more major terror attacks were likely over the next two and a half months.

America's lean mean high-tech elite armed forces swept Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guards aside like dead leaves in March and April. But they now face a widespread, diffuse guerrilla resistance that Bush administration planners never contemplated and which they are still at a loss to deal with.

Far from aggressively hunting down isolated remnants of Saddam's old Baathist loyalists, as advocates of the war interpreted military operations in Iraq last fall, U.S. combat brigades there are now hunkered down in their bivouacs with Pentagon civilian chiefs pressuring senior military commanders to keep casualties down as much as possible during the election cycle.

Pentagon hawks and their media supporters have claimed that the rapid creation of an Iraqi police and security force, now over 200,000 in number will take the pressure off U.S. forces and defeat the insurgency handily. But this appears no more than an exercise in wishful thinking.

The Iraqi force has been rapidly recruited and poorly screened. It is poorly paid and even more poorly trained. Respected military analyst Anthony Cordesman of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded in a recent report: "Few seem to be trained or equipped to deal with the most common means of insurgent attack."

Instead, the police themselves have become the repeated targets of highly successful guerrilla attacks clearly meant to terrify and demoralize them -- a classic tactic in modern insurgent guerrilla campaigns going back to the Irish Republican Army's successful onslaught upon the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1920. Some 25 of them were killed in a single guerrilla attack in Falluja recently. U.S. forces didn't help them at all.

As Trudy Rubin wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer March 5, the police are "outmatched and outgunned." She continued, "Tens of thousands of new [police are ill-equipped to fight terrorists or well-armed insurgents."

The rate of attrition on U.S. troops has dropped significantly in the past two months, in part because of the far more cautious, indeed defensive U.S. tactics. But this is at the cost of leaving the guerrillas alone and dramatically cutting down on active patrols and aggressive measures to interdict them.

The other and probably more important cause for the apparent lull is that the pattern of guerrilla activity has focused on killing and terrorizing middle class professional Iraqis and establishing political control over villages and significant areas of cities.

As we predicted months ago in UPI Analysis, the capture of Saddam Hussein did not end, significantly disrupt or demoralize the resistance, because most of it was not inspired, financed or controlled by Saddam, anyway. Al-Qaida and other international extreme Islamic groups appear to be active in sending in organizers and volunteer activists but the guerrilla cells also appear to have no trouble in recruiting active members and enjoying the passive but important support of a far larger pool of Iraqis in which to operate.

The current situation is unstable and unpredictable, but one thing about it can safely be predicted: it is not stable. The United States has announced a timetable to hand over power to an Iraqi authority by June 30. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and their inner circle of advisers appear still determined to make sure that Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress gets the job.

At a lower level, grim and gritty practical planners in the Pentagon are under no illusions they will be allowed to pull out even if that happens. The planners project that at least 100,000 U.S. troops will have to stay in Iraq for at least the next two and more years well into 2006 and probably far beyond.

But the real wild card in the evolution of the guerrilla war is what Iraq's 60 percent majority Shiites will do. They are basically going along with the handover date and the commitment to free election, but not at all passively.

Chalabi is Shiite himself but does not have any significant constituency in the community. The pattern of recent terrorist attacks aimed at massacring Shiites during religious ceremonies clearly appears aimed to enrage the Shiites and get them to turn possibly on Sunni minority Iraqis but more especially on the occupying U.S. forces for being unable to protect them.

So far, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Hussein Sistani, the most eminent and politically significant Shiite religious leader in Iraq, has been playing a cautious waiting game, superficially going along with the U.S. transition timetable but certainly not committing himself to Washington.

And if Sistani fails to get open elections that deliver candidates of his choice to run Iraq, the Shiites could turn violently hostile on the occupying U.S. forces very fast. If that happened, the worrisome, but short-term containable guerrilla war could rapidly become unmanageable, U.S. military intelligence analysts warn.

Pentagon procurement chiefs are racing to send out far more Humvee patrol vehicles than they ever anticipated they would need. Multiple tons of extra armor is being bolted on the vehicles to protect them from the now regular routine of Iraqi guerrilla bomb and mine attacks. And even the regular work of maintenance on the vehicles is straining logistic capabilities. Where an Abrams M1 Main Battle Tank engine can be pulled out and replaced in only a few hours, it takes days to do the same job on a Humvee carrying extra armor.

The U.S. Army in Iraq, therefore, is being badly stretched by the demands of containing a guerrilla campaign that it has not mastered and that has the potential to metastasize in scale and intensity.

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