Stories in The Australian ("Zarqawi Set to Try Guerilla Tactics") and The Times of London ("Al-Qaeda Leader Plans an Iraq Army") are being spun by war supporters as signs that Zarqawi's been all but defeated:

The London Times' Michael Smith reports that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is putting together a private army in order to move beyond suicide bombings....

If Zarqawi is finally running out of willing martyrs, his effectiveness is coming to an end. Professional militaries have a much easier time fighting organized military forces than stopping suicide bombers....

But here's what the Times story actually says -- and it doesn't seem to refer to "organized military forces" in the traditional sense:

THE leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is attempting to set up his own mini-army and move away from individual suicide attacks to a more organised resistance movement, according to US intelligence sources.

Faced with a shortage of foreign fighters willing to undertake suicide missions, Zarqawi wants to turn his group into a more traditional force mounting co-ordinated guerrilla raids on coalition targets....

The change of strategy will make it easier for Zarqawi to link up with Iraqi insurgents....

(Emphasis mine.)

This would seem to jibe with what I told you a month ago, based on a story by NPR's Deborah Amos: that the bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra and the bloody retaliation that followed led to a healing of the rift between Zarqawi and Iraq-born insurgents. As Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group said in that story,

If there was any chance for a rift, it was destroyed in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, and as long as there are attacks on -- Shiite Islamist groups operating through [the] Interior Ministry, for example, against Sunni Arabs as a community, the insurgents will remain unified, as a protector, of course.

Besides, even if Zarqawi's losing effectiveness, Coalition deaths more than doubled from March to April of this year -- and it sure seems as if IEDs are working for whichever insurgents are using thrm. If our professional military is having a "much easier time" with roadside bombs these days than with suicide bombers, you'd never know it by the casualty count.