A U.S. assault on one or more of Iraq's three main "no-go" areas — including Fallujah — is likely in the next four months as the Iraqi government prepares to extend control before elections slated for January, the U.S. land-forces commander said yesterday.

Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the No. 2 American military leader in Iraq, said the U.S. military will work to regain control of rebel strongholds and turn them over to Iraq's fledgling security forces so elections will be seen by Iraqis — and the world — as free and fair.

"I don't think today you could hold elections," Metz said. "But I do have about four months where I want to get to local control. And then I've got the rest of January to help the Iraqis to put the mechanisms in place."

A U.S. military offensive will be needed to bring the toughest places to heel, Metz said.

The rebel-held western city of Fallujah is the biggest obstacle, he said. The next biggest problem, in U.S. military terms, is Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad and also in guerrilla hands.

Metz says the easiest of the three major trouble spots in which to regain control is Baghdad's Shiite Muslim slum of Sadr City. Parts of the neighborhood of 2 million remain the fiefdom of rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose supporters have wired it with hidden bombs and booby traps, U.S. officials say.

Besides those centers of rebellion, large sections of Iraq remain beyond government control and out of reach of elections. They include Sunni Muslim areas north and west of Baghdad and, perhaps, southern Shiite cities such as Basra, where sections resist U.S. or British troops.

Assaults to retake those areas could be done consecutively or simultaneously, Metz said. He said one or more of the situations might be solved through negotiations, with leaders warning that their cities face a devastating U.S. offensive if the insurgents don't stand down.

"If you're a leader in a town ... do you want to have to go rebuild it because it got destroyed, because foreign fighters came to hang out in your city? They can help us make these decisions," Metz said. [Emphasis mine]

I admit that I have little experience running elections amidst an insurgency, but this strikes me as one of the least viable plans of all time. First, Metz appears to be assuming that foreign fighters are the problem, when every schoolboy knows that native Iraqis are very much a part of the resistance in Sunni strongholds such as Fallujah, Samarra, and Tikrit. It's not as if foreign fighters are holding Iraqis hostage in their own communities, although there have been some reports of grumbling about the behavior of the mujahedin in Fallujah. Are we to assume that folks in these towns, who haven't backed down so far, are just going to decide to play nice all of a sudden? How will the inevitable American military offensive play on the satellite channels? Will the Saudis pressure the U.S. to stand down, as I suspect they did in Fallujah in the spring? And how do we expect ballotting, voter registration, education, and so on to take place so quickly and in the immediate aftermath of severe bloodshed?

My hunch is that the elections will be welcomed by much of the country, but the Sunni insurgents will reject the government and vow to bring it down. Iraq is a brutal place with a history of political intrigue, and the Sunnis are accustomed to being on top. They won't go down easy, and they'll have some powerful backers in the Gulf states. All of this, of course, assumes that the Shi'ites and Kurds will play ball.

This is going to be ugly.

UPDATE: More from today's press briefing with Secretary Rumsfeld and General Myers:

Q: Mr. Secretary, and also General Myers, it would be interesting to hear your view on this: In both the case of Najaf and back in April in Fallujah, the U.S. military, along with Iraqi forces, were inflicting significant casualties on the anti-American insurgents and then pulled back because of a strategy of having a negotiated settlement or trying another tactic. In both cases it looks like those forces have regrouped to fight another day and Fallujah has become pretty much a rebel stronghold.

My question is, is there any rethinking of that strategy? And will the U.S. military, along with the Iraqi government, attempt to reassert control over these so-called "no-go" zones, places where the U.S. is not patrolling and the Iraqi government is not in control?

GEN. MYERS: ... The overall strategy is one that General Casey has been working on very closely with the Iraqi interim government. They have a strategy for the cities. Part of that strategy is that Iraqi security forces must be properly equipped, trained and led to participate in these security operations, and then once it's over can sustain the peace in a given city. And while U.S. forces or coalition forces on their own can do just about anything we want to do, it makes a lot more sense that it be a sustained operation, one that can be sustained by Iraqi security forces. And as the secretary has said and I think we've said here before, we're -- that's what we're about is trying to improve the equipping and the training and the leadership in the Iraqi security forces so they're able to do these operations.

Q: Yeah, but General Metz -- Lieutenant General Metz has suggested that -- first of all, that they won't be able to hold successful elections in Iraq in January as long as you have these pockets of -- these so-called "no-go" zones, and that he suggested there may have to be a U.S. military offensive coordinated with the Iraqi government in order to take care of that problem before January.

GEN. MYERS: All I would say is the election business will be up to the interim government and the national council or assembly that's been put together. They'll determine what they need to have appropriate elections. And we'll support -- Multinational Forces Iraq, led by General Casey, they have a very good relationship with the interim Iraqi government, and they'll sort -- they'll sort through their priorities.

...

Q: Excuse me. Are you suggesting, General, that the U.S. military, in conjunction with the Iraqi forces, will not be able to go into these "no-go" zones to take on the insurgents until the Iraqis are prepared –

GEN. MYERS: That's part of the equation.

Q: -- to take over the security?

GEN. MYERS: That's part of the equation, obviously. You want to have a lasting -- a lasting solution, at least that's what the Iraqi government wants.

Q: But given the -- given the really slow pace at which the Iraqis are being adequately equipped and trained to take on the insurgents, what is the advantage, then, to leaving these insurgents in place in what are essentially safe havens now?

GEN. MYERS: Well, there's more to this strategy than what I said, and that starts to get into the operational issue in terms of how you try to isolate certain communities, and so forth, and set the conditions for successful use of force later on, if you have to go there.

With respect to equipping and training Iraqi security forces -- you said slow to equip and train -- it's relative. By December, we're going to have a substantial number of Iraqi security forces equipped, trained and led to conduct the kind of operations I was talking about.

Is this confusion, dissimulation, or discretion? Are Rumsfeld and Myers merely trying to put an Iraqi face on what will be an American attack? And are they waiting until December to do so? Aren't the elections in January?

As I understand it, General Petreus only considers around 3,000 of the new Iraqi forces capable of executing military operations. Of those, the best fighters are Kurdish perhmerga -- the only Iraqis that fought against their countrymen in Fallujah in the spring were Kurds, and Iraqi forces never truly saw action in Najaf, thanks to Sistani's intervention.