Less than two weeks ago, as Americans struggled to absorb images of four U.S. civilians burned and mutilated in the streets of Fallujah, New York Times correspondent John Burns filed a story that warned of a greater, gathering threat. Beyond Fallujah, he wrote, the United States might be facing a war of national resistance in Iraq –a war in which bonds of Iraqi nationalism and Arab sensibility might transcend deep differences to unite angry Iraqis against U.S. troops.

Within days, as a lightening-fast, Shiite uprising roared along the Tigris and Euphrates, Burns’s warning appeared terribly justified. The last 10 days have seen the most fiery combat since the U.S. invasion, and high death tolls on all sides. And John Burns is still reporting, but now he’s saying the shock of the last week may have sobered even Iraqis.

Guests:

John Burns, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and chief foreign correspondent for the New York Times. Burns has been covering the fighting in Iraq since the U.S. bombing in Baghdad began last March. Burns joined the New York Times in 1975 and has been a Times bureau chief in Kabul, New Delhi, Toronto, Beijing, Moscow and Johannesburg.