"TAKE THE VELVET GLOVES OFF"

"The crux of the problem is we're fighting a counter-insurgency and we should be fighting it much more ruthlessly," said Pletka, a former top Republican staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"We need to take the velvet gloves off, send soldiers out on pro-active sweeps against Baathists who are living freely throughout Iraq, strike fear in the heart of the rejectionists in a way we have not done so far."

But cracking down on the insurgents in a more forceful way risks antagonizing other Iraqis, said Dan Benjamin, an expert in the Middle East and terrorism at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"It's true that within the Sunni triangle, the primary issues remain security and not reconstruction, and this is sporadically true elsewhere in the country, with flare-ups from time to time. But this is an extraordinarily difficult kind of phenomenon to deal with -- primarily because we're trying to pacify the region without arousing even more antipathy. That is the classic dilemma of any type of counter-insurgency."