"That's the nature of an insurgency, you know, where people can fight one minute and then blend into the surroundings the next minute," said Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff. +"If anybody thinks that Falluja's going to be the end of the insurgency in Iraq, that was never the objective, never our intention and even never our hope," Myers told NBC's "Today Show."

What's next? On to Mosul, in Northern Iraq.

INSURGENT fighters seized key areas of the northern city of Mosul yesterday, raiding police stations, shelling US and Iraqi soldiers and threatening Iraq’s third largest city with the same disorder that provoked the assault on Fallujah.

And from there, who knows. This war still may be in its infancy:

In central Baghdad, meanwhile, 17 people were burnt to death by a car bomb, and around the country insurgents carried out what appeared to be co-ordinated attacks. (our emphasis.)

The fighting in Mosul underlines the greatest potential flaw in the attack on Fallujah — that, in driving the resistance out of one stronghold, the US-led coalition runs the risk of simply dispersing it to other Iraqi towns and cities.