Even worse, the soaring death toll since the new government was formed a month ago has blown a huge hole through the Bush administration's political strategy that assumed the elections, assembling of parliament and subsequent creation of a broad-based government would isolate and shrink the insurgency. It hasn't.

There are, in fact, signs that stepped-up government and U.S. counter-insurgency operations are delivering significant blows to the guerrillas. Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr said Thursday that the massive deployment of 40,000 troops of the new Iraqi army and security forces across 23 districts of Baghdad this week had killed 28 guerrillas and netted 700 more suspects.

Further, U.S. military-intelligence reports suggest the active forces in the insurgency are increasingly composed of foreign jihadi fighters who have flocked into Iraq to battle U.S. forces there.

However, the bad news is that so far the vastly increased wave of car bombings and other guerrilla attacks across the country since the announcement of the new Shiite and Kurdish-dominated coalition government continues with no end or even lessening in sight.

Some 48 people were killed in bombings and other violence across the country Thursday, and the violence in Baghdad continued Friday with several bomb attacks on U.S. military convoys.

Since the new government was announced, far from sucking the air out of popular Sunni support for the insurgency (as so many American pundits had confidently predicted), the opposite appears to have happened. Some 825 people have been killed, and U.S. troop fatalities are running at the highest level in several months.

Iraqi civilians are being killed at the rate of 20 a day, a figure that would yield 7,300 more victims over the next year. The Iraqi government announced Thursday that the insurgency has killed 12,000 civilians, including 10,000 Shiites.

That does not include the number of Iraqis who have been killed in firefights between U.S. forces and the insurgents. Estimates for that vary wildly from 20,000 to 100,000 -- both figures factoring in those who were killed during the intense but highly successful three-week campaign to topple Saddam Hussein in March-April 2003.

Vice President Dick Cheney said this week that the insurgency was on its last legs. Other optimistic assessments have argued that the current wave of attacks is a desperate last-ditch attempt to de-legitimize the new government before it can get established.

This assessment should not be dismissed out of hand. If the wave of arrests of hundreds of suspects this week in Operation Lightning leads to significant intelligence breakthroughs in penetrating the guerrilla networks in Baghdad, it might produce some light at the end of the tunnel.

But it hasn't happened yet, whereas the continued wave of death, maiming and generalized terror is all too tangibly real.

U.S. military analysts privately acknowledge that the level of training and leadership of the new Iraqi security forces leaves a great deal to be desired. The current Pentagon civilian leadership erred badly in decreeing that they be run up in such large numbers from scratch.

Many Army officers also privately complain that the private contractors and mercenary organizations the Pentagon contracted much of the training of the new Iraqi forces to have proven amateurish and patchy.

War is one area of human endeavor where it can be unwise to outsource too much or to trust principles of free-market efficiency that work far better in the business world.

Retired Lt. Col. James S. Corum argued in The New York Times Thursday that U.S. strategists in Iraq would be well advised to study the successful lessons of the British counter-insurgency campaign in Malaya in the early 1950s.

There, Gen. Gerald Templar boldly virtually suspended widespread counter-insurgency operations for several months while he pushed through a massive program of intensified training for Malayan police officers and junior leaders.

"By late 1953," Corum wrote, "the police department's effectiveness had notably improved and the government was again winning the war."

By contrast, Corum noted, "By the end of last year there were only two Iraqi officers at the 20-week Infantry Advanced Officers' Course at Fort Benning in Georgia and only one Iraqi officer was sent to the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas last year."

Corum advocated "sending hundreds of Iraqi officers to the United States over the next three to four years while leaving American troop strength at its current level."

The Pentagon, anyway, has been quietly planning with the tacit approval of the administration to maintain current troop levels in Iraq for several years to come, even though current total U.S. force levels are cracking under the strain.

But Corum's advice, while sound, is very unlikely to be a panacea to win the war for many reasons.

First, the United States risks alienating Iraq's 60-percent Shiite majority if it stumbles into a serious conflict with neighboring Iran over Tehran's nuclear program over the next year or two.

Second, the British could draw on more than a century's experience and occupation of Malaya when they were fighting the 1950s communist insurgency. The United States is still a newcomer to Iraq.

Third, the current levels of the insurgency in Iraq's cities, especially Baghdad, are already far worse than anything the British had to face in Malaya even when the insurgency there was at its worst.

Fourth, the British did not have to create an entirely new intelligence apparatus to combat the communist insurgency from scratch.

Fifth, the British army was institutionally vastly experienced in combating such guerrilla wars. The U.S. armed forces in Iraq are being forced to learn the whole book from scratch.

And sixth, the British were defending a long-established state structure that they themselves had created, albeit one that had been disrupted by the Japanese conquest in 1942 and 3 1/2 years of subsequent occupation. The United States is wrestling with the challenge of rebuilding the entire Iraqi state from the ground up.

Most important of all, the U.S. forces in Iraq may not have a leisurely three or four years to beef up Iraqi forces from scratch. Much depends on how the war develops over the coming summer.

Even if the insurgency cannot be quickly eliminated -- and very few if any U.S. military analysts believe that it can be -- if the current counter-offensive and strategy proves successful, it could be reduced to a far lower level of daily attacks and casualties than we are still seeing. And that would buy time both to upgrade the officer cadres of the Iraqi security forces and to explore political strategies for eliminating popular support too.

But if the insurgency continues to rage at its current levels of activity, the pressure will be on the White House and the Pentagon to come up with new answers -- and fast.

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