IRAQ: The hostage crisis in Iraq has been skilfully manipulated by insurgent groups in the country - most spectacularly in recent days by self-styled al-Qaeda leader, Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, writes Tom Clonan
His Tawhid and Jihad groups have achieved the maximum terror effect from their kidnapping of Americans Jack Hensley, Eugene Armstrong and Briton Kenneth Bigley.
Calls by Zarqawi to release female Iraqi prisoners - of which there are few - is a calculated attempt to humiliate US President Mr George W Bush and UK Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair by making a request they clearly cannot or will be unwilling to fulfil.
The demand is also designed - by offering Mr Blair the tantalising prospect of Mr Bigley's release - to fracture trust between the major coalition partners.
The executions of the Americans in recent days were choreographed to yield maximum media coverage in a world already over-exposed to violent images.
The barbaric and coldly calculated manner of their execution was callously designed to ensure saturation media coverage. Indeed the last minute attempts to secure the release of Mr Bigley is suspected by the intelligence community of being simply an attempt to generate a macabre drama giving further propaganda value to his murder.
These latest victims of the Iraqi insurgency were certainly "soft" targets, apparently watched over by a single unarmed guard and living outside US or British military protection.
Despite the availability of such soft targets, however, the Iraqi insurgency continues to grow in strength, ingenuity and boldness. It is not confining itself to soft targets.
The American embassy in Baghdad, formerly known as the green zone, is the largest and most heavily fortified US embassy in the world. Despite its secure location and fortification it is mortared daily by insurgents.
Given the relatively short range of such weapons and the fact they are crew-served, their use implied that Iraqi insurgents enjoyed relative freedom of action within Baghdad itself.
This fraught security environment is further emphasised by ongoing insurgent attacks on other "hard" military targets such as US patrols and convoys. During one such attack on a so-called hard target last week, seven US marines lost their lives in a roadside bomb attack on their armoured vehicles.
The only way for Centcom to thwart such attacks - in the absence of effective intelligence - is to deploy outside of their bases and, in military parlance, to hold ground.
To achieve this objective the Americans would have to do two things.
First, they would have to re-enforce massively to get the correct number of "boots on the ground".
They would also have to engage in urban combat, the type of which they have been thus far keen to avoid - and as witnessed in Falluja with good reason.
The Iraqi interim government on the other hand has failed to create a credible multi-ethnic security force to replace existing Kurdish, Sunni and Shia militias.
As elections approach and the violence no doubt intensifies Iraq is in effect an unsecured environment consisting of diametrically opposed and heavily armed camps divided along ethnic lines.
If an already under-strength US military presence fails to curb insurgency and fails to prevent internecine ethnic violence the coming months may yet herald a descent into civil war.
Tom Clonan is a retired army officer and fellow of the Inter University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, based at Loyola University, Chicago