There is no doubt that al-Qaida has lost a great deal of ground in central Iraq over the past year as a result of its own savagery and of the more intelligent, long-overdue U.S. strategy of seeking to strengthen and work with local Sunni tribal leaders and authorities in Anbar province.

However, the continued refusal of the Shiite-run government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad to compromise with Iraq's Sunni minority has ensured that al-Qaida, savage as it is, will not lack for enough supporters to carry out continued widespread destructive operations.

And although the total rate of civilian casualties remains significantly lower than it was 18 months to two years ago in Iraq, and although U.S. military casualties continue to run at far lower rates than they did at that time, anyone who bothered to monitor the daily reports coming out from Iraq over the past two months could see that al-Qaida and its allied insurgents remained capable of inflicting a steady, regular toll upon innocent civilians.

For all the short-term tactical successes of Gen. David Petraeus' policy, therefore, all he ultimately succeeded in doing was buying time for U.S. policymakers in Iraq - time which they have refused to use to any good strategic end.

What conclusions, then, should we draw from Tuesday's bloodbath across Iraq? First, although al-Qaida has been knocked down in that country, it is very clearly far from out.

Second, al-Qaida remains perfectly capable of making tactical alliances with other military forces operating in Iraq such as some Shiite militias against either the U.S. armed forces, or the Iraqi government or both.

Third, the U.S. government's plan to switch the main thrust of U.S. military activities against Shiite militias in the south of the country, as Gen. Petraeus indicated in his congressional testimony last week, is extremely rash and unwise. The Shiites are three times as numerous as the Sunni minority in Iraq and Shiite militias have now controlled all of southern Iraq for at least three years. The Badr Brigades in particular are now virtually inter-changeable with the Iraqi security forces.

Finally, having ridiculously over-estimated the reliability and operational capabilities of the Iraqi army up to now, following the fiasco in Basra over the past few weeks, U.S. policymakers are now swinging to the other extreme and under-estimating them.

The Iraqi army certainly proved both unable and unwilling to incur or inflict significant casualties to root out Moqtada Sadr's al-Mehdi Army from its strongholds in and around Basra. But those same Iraqi armed forces could give the U.S. armed forces some nasty surprises if the U.S. military starts inflicting significant casualties on Shiite militias that have close ties to the Iraqi armed forces.

Petraeus has shown he is capable of learning from experience and successfully switching tactics in Iraq. But he may have a lot more learning to do.