Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who returned earlier this month from a weeklong visit to Iraq and Kuwait, said U.S. commanders told him al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, the group's franchise-holder in Iraq, "has been defeated at a tactical and operational level in Baghdad and Anbar province and is trying to reconstitute in the north and along the Syrian frontier."

In a memo drafted for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and based on more than 40 visits and briefings, McCaffrey writes: "The Iraqi people have turned on (al-Qaida) because it overreached trying to impose an alien and harsh practice of Islam inconsistent with the more moderate practices of the Sunni minority" there -- 16 percent of the population.

He wrote that "the foreign jihadist elements" of the group "with their enormous hatred of what they view as the apostate Shia" had found themselves at odds with the nationalistic sentiments of most Iraqis.

He called the senior leaders of al-Qaida in Mesopotamia "walking dead men" because of the volume of intelligence tips from Iraqis "coming directly to U.S. forces."

McCaffrey's conclusions are reflected in the titles of the briefings he was given, one of which was titled: "The northern zones �� (al-Qaida's) final refuge."

Others are remarking on what Defense Secretary Robert Gates last week called "a sharp decline in violence" in the country since the U.S. troop surge began at the beginning of the year.

But critics say much of the decline is attributable to what David Enders called "neighborhoods having been effectively 'cleansed'" of rival ethnic groups.

Enders is a journalist who has spent nearly half of the last four years in Iraq and is author of the book "Baghdad Bulletin."

"Any progress the military is claiming to have made in Iraq should be looked at in the big picture," he said. "The prison population is larger than ever �� (and) you also have the problem of millions of refugees, many of whom have had their homes taken from them. What will happen to them?"

He warned against confusing fewer U.S. casualties with progress and accused U.S. policymakers of storing up problems for themselves by playing the ethnic card. "From the very beginning of the occupation, the focus has been on sectarian quotas and playing one group off another."

The broader situation in Iraq notwithstanding, the argument for al-Qaida's increasingly isolation there is unanswerable. It is underlined by recent messages from both Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, gently chiding insurgents for unspecified mistakes and warning sternly against the dangers of factionalism.

Moreover, none of the threatened "blowback" from Iraq -- plots in Europe or America hatched by veterans of the insurgency there that many counter-terror specialists warned of -- has materialized.

The only Western plot executed by terrorists linked to Iraq has been the bungled British nightclub bombings at the end of June, and the degree to which the perpetrators were actually linked to the insurgency remains unclear.

But it remains an open question whether al-Qaida in Mesopotamia has been defeated, rather than merely knocked back; still more so whether any defeat can be translated into a broader victory in Iraq for the United States. That depends on a political process that has shown little progress in the last year.

(Next: Al-Qaida has reconstituted itself under the nose of the Pakistani military.)

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