With Saddam Hussein still at large, whipping up resistance and sabotage in taped messages believed to be authentic, his loyalists and al-Qaida terrorists from other countries continue to attack the U.S. occupying forces and any Iraqis and foreigners seen as collaborators with the occupation. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently summed up the enemies in Iraq as “dead-enders, foreign terrorists and criminal gangs.”

A new threat, missing from the Rumsfeld list, now complicates the entanglement: the Iraqi people themselves. The New York Times quoted Defense Department officials as saying that the most formidable foe in Iraq in the months ahead may be the resentment of ordinary Iraqis increasingly hostile to the American military occupation.

Recent polling in Iraq by the State Department’s intelligence branch, said the newspaper, showed significant hostility toward the American presence among ordinary Iraqis. Their resentment stemmed not only from continued shortages of electricity and other essential services but also from cultural factors. The Times quoted a defense official as saying, “To a lot of Iraqis, we’re no longer the guys who threw out Saddam, but the ones who are busting down doors and barging in on their wives and daughters.”

This reported growing popular anger could supply an essential element to what is already recognized as classic guerrilla warfare. Perhaps no one knew more about guerrilla fighting than Mao Zedong, who observed, “The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.” A resentful population can provide food, cover and intelligence to guerrilla fighters, hide them from an occupying force and withhold cooperation from the occupiers.

As the Pentagon well understands, this evolution in the unfinished war in Iraq lends urgency for the United States to hasten its mission while shifting the security burden to the United Nations or other countries and then to the Iraqis themselves.

President Bush properly took note last week of the need, although perhaps not the urgency. A current move to substitute Iraqi for U.S. forces to patrol streets and guard against guerrilla attacks is a step in the right direction. Iraq is not yet another Vietnam; and there remains some time to prevent it from becoming one.