Winning all the battles and losing the war

Hamza Hendawi of the Associated Press has an analysis of the situation in Iraq that has resulted from the storming of Fallaju. In addition to jeopardizing the legitimacy of the elections still scheduled for January it has opened riffs between the various social and religious groups within Iraq and not accomplished the military goals of stopping the insurgency.

The recapture of Fallujah has not broken the insurgents' will to fight and may not pay the big dividend U.S. planners had hoped - to improve security enough to hold national elections in Sunni Muslim areas of central Iraq, according to U.S. and Iraqi assessments.

Instead, the battle for control of the Sunni city 40 miles west of Baghdad has sharpened divisions among Iraq's major ethnic and religious groups, fueled anti-American sentiment and stoked the 18-month-old Sunni insurgency.

Those grim assessments, expressed privately by some U.S. military officials and by some private experts on Iraq, raise doubts as to whether the January election will produce a government with sufficient legitimacy, especially in the eyes of the country's powerful Sunni Muslim minority.

While the Sunnis threaten to boycott the elections the Shiite community insists they go forward. At the same time, the Kurds see their hope of a federalist government that preserves their system of self-rule in the north fading under a Shiite dominated central government. The storming of Falluja has not stopped the insurgents and has resulted in conditions that may result in civil war.

Juan Cole also does a good job of covering this topic this morning.