Is the end of the insurgency in sight?

Mark Steyn recaps “a good week for cowboy unilateralists.” Now that Saddam has been apprehended “looking like a department-store Santa sleeping off a bender in the sewer,” Steyn expects that the insurgency will “peter out, like the dictator, not with a bang but with a wimper.”
Hiwa Osman, an Iraqi Kurd journalist, writing in the Washington Post, agrees. Osman says: “Some foreign observers and journalists have expressed doubts about the importance of Hussein’s capture, and whether it will weaken the violent Iraqi campaign against U.S. forces and all other supporters of a new Iraq. Such doubts are misplaced. Saddam’s role in the ‘resistance’ was both symbolic and practical. His arrest should result in the collapse of the insurgency, even if the impact is not felt immediately. The insurgents may not lay down their weapons. When the head of a snake is cut off, the body twitches for some time. With Saddam sitting in jail — and soon in a courtroom — his loyalists will eventually get the message that the head is gone.” Accordingly, Osman thinks “that hissing sound [may well be] the last gasp of Iraqi insurgency.”