Death was invited to meet the Americans, but instead he settled for Ba'athist scum:

American forces fended off an attempted ambush Sunday, killing at least [46] Iraqis and capturing eight others in the northern city of Samarra. At least five U.S. soldiers, [22] Iraqi attackers and a civilian were injured.

...A coalition source told Fox News that one of the U.S. convoys that came under attack was transporting a significant amount of money..."It was a well-organized and complex ambush, but they obviously picked the wrong convoy to attack. They could not have known," the source told Fox News.

That last quote undercuts the suggestion, mentioned by a few television anchors, that the ambush represents a major intelligence leak. Even Fedeyeen have an investment in self-preservation (or cowardice, whichever instructs their clandestine behavior more strongly) and you'd assume wouldn't have engaged in such a straightforward engagement if they had complete information. But if the White House's accelerated drafting of Iraqis - and diminished abilities to discern out-of-work innocents from terrorist plants - did cause a leak that led to this attack, we can draw two conclusions about the insurgents.

First: despite the initial psychological and political shock the Allies took watching a briefly "quiet" postwar Iraq turn to scores of organized attacks daily, the terrorists are no more capable of military victory than they were before Saddam's army fired a shot. Fought against fairly, American troops (ambushed, no less) are unbeatable.

Second: the insurgency is growing desperate, or factious, or impatient, or directionless, or a combination of all four losing qualities. Why else would over fifty Fedeyeen expose themselves and provide the Allies with a congregated target? Stupidity is what led the Hussein brothers to hole up together and die together; could forces of terror have too finally run out of ideas and straight into dumb thug tactics? The "Mogadishu" window has passed; Bush is tenacious with his most controversial foreign policies, not diffident, and the American public has come out of this confusing summer and fall with majority support for him intact. Against a reliable American homefront, Iraq's insurgents are faced with a strategic impossibility, and the choice between sniping at foreign targets (provoking costly retaliation) and Iraqis (turning their fear into a shared, angry determination alongside the Allies).

In our hearts, I think, those of us considering ourselves optimists always knew that Iraq would succeed as a free and peaceful state. But it's always been a question of how soon problems of life and death would be replaced by civil issues - writing a constitution, struggling culturally, rebuilding industries and academies, good problems like that. 5,000 insurgents and their small group of Iraqi supporters will still take time to defeat; but that unrecoverable decline may actually have begun over the past weeks.

JUST A NOTE: The casualty figures have changed twice, now. I'll update accordingly.