Homegrown

For those who continue to be in denial and claim that Iraq's problems are all the fault of "foreign fighters": the US military thinks that the insurgency is homegrown and that most militants are Iraqis:

Foreign militants such as Jordanian-born Abu Musab Zarqawi are believed responsible for carrying out videotaped beheadings, suicide car bombings and other high-profile attacks. But U.S. military officials said Iraqi officials tended to exaggerate the number of foreign fighters in Iraq to obscure the fact that large numbers of their countrymen have taken up arms against U.S. troops and the American-backed interim Iraqi government.

"They say these guys are flowing across [the border] and fomenting all this violence. We don't think so," said a senior military official in Baghdad. "What's the main threat? It's internal."

But of course US politicians and the Iraqi regime can never, ever admit that.