The most ominous aspect of the killing of 16 Iraqi policemen in a popular kebab restaurant in Baghdad Sunday was that it was no longer "hot" news in the United States. Even the New York Times, which covers the insurgency thoroughly and impeccably, only put a photograph from the attack on its front page. The fact that a day of bombings had shootings Sunday left 30 dead in Baghdad left only made it up to Page A10.

But the strategic as well as tactical lessons of the attack were truly grim. Only a few weeks after the much touted Operation Lightning deployed 40,000 Iraqi police and security forces in a crack down on 23 districts of Baghdad and launched a month of counter-insurgency operations that up to now have netted 1,200 guerrilla suspects, the insurgents continue to strike at apparent will, inflict an apparently unending flood of casualties on the Iraqi security forces.

The attack also came in the very heart of the U.S. security presence in Iraq, right beside the Green Zone government compound that is the nerve center of the Iraqi government and the U.S. military presence in the country.

In every guerrilla war of the past century, any indigenous security forces and state structures that have suffered this kind of attrition and, even worse, the corrosive effect on courage, initiative and morale that comes from feeling trapped in a defenseless shooting gallery, has lost the war. Even when the tide has been turned, it has never been the worn down indigenous security forces that were able to do it, but elite army units from the state itself or, in colonial war situations, elite counterinsurgency forces backed by large numbers of well-trained regular troops, that turned the tide.

But the native police forces of the Royal Irish Constabulary in the Irish War of Independence from 1919 to 1921, the Royal Ulster Constabulary facing the onslaught of a later Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland from 1970 through 1973, the French-directed gendarmerie in Algeria during the first phase of the terrible 1954-62 War of Independence, and the South Vietnamese rural police forces in the years up to 1965 were never able to make a comeback.

The dilemma however, for the Bush administration in dealing with Iraq today is that this inexorable dynamic of modern guerrilla war flies directly in the phase of their strategy for dealing with Iraq. U.S. policy, such as it is, is predicated on scaling back U.S. forces in Iraq and training the new Iraqi security forces to pick up the slack.

But as Lt. Col. James S. Corum pointed out in the New York Times earlier this month, it will take several years of intensive training far beyond anything that has yet been done, or even attempted, to make the Iraqi security forces truly effective. And, indeed, it will simply be impossible to do so, however much resources are thrown at the problem, until those fledgling forces can be protected from onslaughts like Sunday's restaurant bomb massacre.

But to do that will require a far greater concentration of U.S. forces in Iraq than is currently possible. President George W. Bush's "coalition of the willing" is unraveling by he day, with nations from the so-called "new" Europe of former communist states like Poland and Ukraine now following in the footsteps of the "old' Western European nations like France and Germany either refusing to send any extra forces to Iraq, or rapidly removing those that are still there.

That means the burden of establishing peace and security in Iraq will fall harder than ever on the already overworked, exhausted and hard-pressed regular forces, National Guard and Army Reserve units of the U.S. armed forces.

But there are only 140,000 or so of them in Iraq now, and to be effective against the current insurgency, probably at least three times as many would be required, and even then they would need very different military, intelligence-gathering and political strategies than those they have labored under until now.

In the meantime, even the current insufficient troop levels in Iraq have greatly curtailed the capabilities of the U.S. armed forces to maintain significant deterrent deployments, let alone those necessary for possible future preemptive operations, elsewhere in the world.

There is as yet no sign that the White House or the civilian echelon at the Pentagon is contemplating any significant change of direction in Iraq, but unease is growing in one very important power group, the Republican majorities in Congress.

Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), the same legislator who at one point suggested renaming French fires in the House cafeteria as "freedom fries", has said he is convinced the United States should now declare a cut off date for leaving Iraq. And over the weekend, Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb, a Vietnam ground combat vet and longtime skeptic about Iraq, made his strongest public criticism of administration policy yet. And Hagel is seriously contemplating a candidacy for the 2008 presidential election.

None of this means the war is irrevocably lost yet. None of it means some kind of compromise political strategy to defuse the dangers that a unilateral U.S. pullout would unleash cannot yet be found.

But it does mean that the current strategy is not succeeding and that the back of the insurgency -- the hopes of U.S. leaders to the contrary -- has not yet been broken. Until fresh analysts and policies are brought to the Pentagon and the White House, nothing will change.