The NY Times yesterday:

BAGHDAD, Nov. 21 — A bomb exploded in an armored car among those belonging to the speaker of Parliament, wounding the American security guard who was driving it out of a parking area in the government Green Zone and disrupting a meeting of lawmakers nearby, a parliamentary aide said.

Though the speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, was not in the vehicle and was unscathed, the assassination attempt was one of the most serious breaches of security yet within the Green Zone, the heavily fortified government district on the west bank of the Tigris River.

The bomb, which exploded in midafternoon, was planted inside an armored car that resembled the one the speaker uses and was usually used as a decoy car in his convoy, said the parliamentary aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly about the attack.

Only part of the bomb exploded, the aide said. A police official said investigators believe that the bomb was planted inside the Green Zone and detonated by cellphone. [emph added]

Juan Cole shares a private letter from a friend:

Another friend, a Sunni sheikh of the Shammar tribe noted to me that thousands of former officers are prepared to assault the G[reen] Z[one]. It is no longer a matter of can they do it, they are only mulling over the timing. The breach of the Green Zone security the other day was a test of their ability to get in, and not a real attempt at a coup, though it is reported as such. Every Iraqi I talk to says unambiguously that the resistance attached to the former regime would take out the Shiite militias with barely a fight, but that the resistance will not commit wholesale revenge against the Shiite population. They just want to get rid of the "carpet baggers" from Iran.

Sneaking a bomb into the Green Zone is probably a bit easier than assaulting the Zone with “thousands of former officers” but still, it might not be an impossible task if one is willing to accept massive casualties. An attack like this would be reported, and commented upon adversely by all the empty heads in the electronic news. It should also not be lost that a secondary objective is freeing Iraq from the American “carpet baggers.”

Don’t view this as a massive breach of the concrete blast walls of the Zone and then a wholesale massacre of dozens or hundreds of Americans and Iraqis inside. (If you want to see what the walls look like go view the video program we mentioned here.) It could very well be a situation similar to Tet 1968, where the actual death and physical damage was out of all proportion to the catastrophic impact of the actual attacks. Although fighting in Hue continued for a month after the onset of the attacks, the world was transfixed by the image of VC occupying part of the US Embassy. The fact that the building they occupied was insignificant in the actual operation of the Embassy was lost amid the shock of the action itself. There are some analysts who date the ”loss” of Viet Nam to the Tet offensive.