LONDON/BAGHDAD, 3 November 2003 — Sharp disagreements are emerging between the US and the UK over the exact nature of the Iraqi resistance, amid warnings that the US is losing the intelligence war against the rebels.

After eight days in which Iraqi fighters have scored a series of major blows to the coalition and its Iraqi allies, intelligence and military officials in Iraq and on both sides of the Atlantic are at odds over whether they are fighting a Saddam-led movement or a series of disparate partisan groups. They are just as divided on finding a way to halt the escalating violence.

The latest violence comes amid increasingly bleak assessments from Washington, where the latest attacks have been compared in the media to Vietnam’s 1968 Tet Offensive against US forces and described by Sandy Berger, national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, as a “classic guerrilla war”.

The comments follow leaked assessments by both the US proconsul in Iraq, Ambassador Paul Bremer, and US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that war against the resistance was going less well than planned, with the latter describing a “long, hard slog”.

By last week that long, hard slog had seen attacks on coalition forces and the Iraqis cooperating with them reaching a level of 33 a day — more than twice the level in July. Anti-coalition fighters have ratcheted up the scale of attacks on schools, police and politicians, while assaults on the US-led forces have become more confident and sophisticated.

US and UK officials admit that at the center of the worsening crisis — which has seen the UN and other aid agencies withdraw international staff from the country following the bombing of the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad — is a continuing failure of hard intelligence on exactly who is behind the resistance.

The urgency of the problem was underlined by comments by a former CIA director last week that unless the coalition forces get a grip on the intelligence-gathering problem — in particular building relationships with ordinary Iraqis — it may be too late.

“We’re at a crossroads,” Stansfield Turner, told the Christian Science Monitor. “If in the next few weeks we don’t persuade the Iraqi on the street that we’re going to straighten things out... we won’t get that intelligence.”

A mark of that failure, say officials, has been the inability of coalition forces and the intelligence and policing agencies available to them to solve any of the major bombings that began in August.

“The fundamental issue with counterinsurgency warfare is intelligence. Intelligence is what matters and it is 90 percent of the battle,” Gordon Adams, a former associate director for national security, told the New York Times.

“It’s knowing who they are, where they are and when they act. If we know anything from Vietnam and the various things that have gone on in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is that our humint (human intelligence) is terrible. We know that we were woefully underprepared in general.”

It is a view shared in part by British officials, who concede that attempts to infiltrate the resistance have been without success.

Others are sharply critical of how the intelligence war against the rebels has been handled. They point to a woeful shortage of Arab linguists and analysts familiar with Arab culture in the US-run sector, despite being six months into the insurgency.

To counter this, Pentagon officials briefed last week that some of these specialists working among the 1,400-strong Iraq Survey Group on the unsuccessful search for stockpiles of unconventional weapons would be transferred to this effort.

So who exactly is the resistance? In recent days American officials have briefed US papers for the first time that Saddam Hussein may be playing a significant role in coordinating and directing attacks by his loyalists, despite conceding such reports could not be corroborated.

The claims are based in part on reports that Saddam met Izzat Ibrahim, a senior Iraqi general suspected by American officials of playing a significant role in organizing the resistance and coordinating with Ansar Al-Islam, linked to Al-Qaeda.

The depiction by these Pentagon officials of the structure of the resistance — though tentatively expressed — suggest a hierarchical organization, led by former Saddam officials, with Saddam at its head, and allied to groups of foreign jihadists and Al-Qaeda under a single command.

Whether true or not, it is a politically convenient description of the resistance for the Bush regime, suggesting as it does that the rebels represent no more than the desperate remains of Saddam’s regime with no wider resonance, despite escalating attacks.

It is not, however, recognized by British officials. The picture that they paint of what is going on in Iraq is a more chaotic and a far more dangerous one.

“What we are looking at,” one UK official told The Observer, “is not some monolithic organization with a clear command. That would be far easier for us to deal with and get into. Instead, we are looking at lots of different groups with different agendas. They are locally organized with each having its loyalty focused on middle-ranking former commanders.”

What he describes is a network of partisan-type groups without a central command and links between them based on personal relationships — an organic rather than monolithic structure.

The groups’ communications — based, say Iraqis, on couriers, often teenage boys, to carry messages — have been equally difficult for the coalition to penetrate.

And they have very little difficulty in getting materiel for attacks or the money to finance the operations. Iraqi military doctrine under Saddam, especially after the first Gulf War, long envisaged the risk of a second US-led invasion that would attempt to depose the regime. The consequence was the placement across the country of hidden caches of weapons, explosives, fuel and cash, all in vast amounts — everything required to run a guerrilla war.

“We are looking at three categories of group involved in the resistance,” said one official. “There are ex-Baathists, especially in the Sunni triangle (where the majority of Special Republican guard and members of Saddam’s security organizations were traditionally recruited from). Then there are groups like Ansar Al-Islam and groups that may be affiliated to Al-Qaeda or sympathetic to them. Finally, there are foreign jihadists who have been drawn to Iraq to fight Americans.’

Most worrying of all is the emergence of a broad, post-Saddam ideology across the groups. And if recent polling in Baghdad is to be believed, it is rapidly gaining currency with ordinary Iraqis. It is crudely simple, insisting that the US-led occupation is an assault against both Islam and the wider Arab nation, that Iraqis must resist and that anyone who assists the occupiers is an enemy as much as US troops.