Saddam’s rule showing signs of cracking?

John Burns has another dynamite story from Iraq, detailing how Saddam’s freeing of thousands of prisoners from his network of gulags may have backfired.
A street protests erupted and didn’t immediately disperse. Mothers demanded an accounting of their sons from government officials. While calm was restored, often roughly, the question I’ve asked my people over there is whether this is the crack that might bring the whole regime down, but I’ve not yet heard from them.
The protests are unprecedented and Wamid Nadhmi, a political science professor at Baghdad University called them “very, very important and unusual” in the Washington Post (How did the Post get sources at Baghdad University, I wonder?) Other diplomats caution that this might be an isolated event, however.
I wonder. Nadhmi proffered a tantalizing idea that the protests weren’t spontaneous. “To have a demonstration means there must be some sort of organizations behind it,” he is quoted as saying.
We know there is an Iraqi resistance operating outside of the country, but inside it? It’s possible, and most likely probable, that the United States is helping out local underground resistance movements. Could this have been their work?