What do this story about the 2006 NIE estimate still not being ready and this story about the audacious insurgent raid on an American military compound in Karbala have in common?  They are both attempts to forestall bad news that might lose the White House's "new Iraq strategy" even more support. 

What, you say you can understand that they don't want anyone to see how bad the NIE estimates are but why Karbala?  Why does this bode ill for the upcoming "surge"? 

Look at it this way, the raid in Karbala looks bad for one because a number of American servicemen died and it suggests that insurgents are even more sophisticated than we've been lead to believe, after all they had American uniforms and spoke "some English", but the implication of the news reports is that the killers definitely had inside help.  From whom? well probably members of the Iraqi Army and police forces, the same guys we will be relying on to be out front pacifying Baghdad.  Its one of the only ways of reading the fact that these guys exclusively targeted and killed Americans and Iraqi security forces watched them run off without intervening. 

It's definitely a double whammy so I suggest you'll see much more made of the fact that the insurgents are really tricky as opposed to the fact the Iraqi military isn't entirely trustworthy.