Algiers, Belfast, Baghdad . . . uh oh.

UPI's Martin Sieff makes the analogy that nobody in the Bush administration wants made.

There is a grim inevitability to the latest wave of suicide car bombings, assignations and other attacks in Iraq and a dire conclusion can no longer be avoided. The United States now has a Battle of Algiers or Belfast on its hands in Baghdad. [...] A full-scale guerrilla war against U.S. and Western forces in Iraq is now fully underway, and it has already reached formidable proportions.

The attacks are by no means limited to Baghdad or even only to major cities. And U.S. and British military analysts have told United Press International they cannot be all blamed on old Iraqi Baathists or foreign jihadi troublemakers either. On the contrary, these professional military experts are explicit that the overall pattern of violence clearly shows a widespread, popular revolt with a high degree of decentralization and local initiative. The resistance is rapidly evolving and organizing, they say, but it is organizing from the bottom up rather than from the top down.

Read the whole thing to get the full, fleshed-out version, because I can't do it justice in a summary. Suffice it to say that we are facing a much, much larger and better armed adversary with proportionally far fewer occupying troops, little to no indigenous support, and none of the other advantages a colonial history confers.

Uh oh.