"This is not a war that we can yet say we are winning. The most senior U.S. defense officials say that new combatants are emerging as fast as we can kill or capture the old ones. We may have reduced the number of cells of former regime loyalists, but a new mixture has emerged, made up of Baath loyalists, Sunnis angry at the United States and fearful of a loss of privilege and power, and native Iraqi Islamists, along with foreign Islamic fighters and other volunteers. At this point, U.S. intelligence officials cannot even agree on whether al Qaeda exercises any kind of central leadership over its activities in Iraq or has "franchised" its operations so that groups and cells with only loose links to al Qaeda's leaders are playing a key role."(by Anthony Codesman, the wisest of US military analysts).