Goldfarb linked the this story from USA Today about a video showing young boys "training to kill, kidnap." This comes on the heels of last week's story that al Qaeda had duped two mentally retarded women into becoming suicide bombers. Al Qaeda's reliance on children, women, and the mentally handicapped certainly does, as Goldfarb suggests, speak to their potential recruiting base for bombers. The past year's relentless operations against the terror network have resulted in thousands of al Qaeda operatives killed and thousands more captured.

But there are other reasons why al Qaeda uses children, women, and the mentally handicapped as suicide bombers. Al Qaeda selects and indoctrinates these kind of "recruits" to penetrate security while at the same time sowing distrust among the security forces and the population.

Women, children, and the handicapped are not considered threats and are able to more easily penetrate checkpoints. By their nature they do not arrouse suspicion in security personnel. The term "military aged male" exists because they are the primary, secondary, and tertiary suspects.

By using women, children, and the handicapped as bombers, al Qaeda seeks to undermine the bonds of civil society. When soldiers and police--or even civilians--can no longer trust people who were once presumed to be noncombatants, the effect is widespread terror. And for al Qaeda, the tactic has the added bonus of increasing the likelihood that security forces will kill or wound the innocent for fear of attack.

But al Qaeda also incurs costs in using innocents to conduct strikes. In Iraq, these acts have been widely condemned. They serve to unite the people against terrorism and to prove al Qaeda is a foreign presence intent on destroying Iraqi society.

So while this tactic should not necessarily be taken as evidence that al Qaeda in Iraq is in it's "death throes"--al Qaeda in Iraq has been using children and the mentally handicapped to launch attacks since early 2005--neither does it indicate a healthy insurgency.