Iraq Insider

"You know, a lot of folks say, well, what's next, Mr. President? And my answer is, we have come too far in this important theater in this war on terror not to make sure that we succeed. And therefore any further troop reductions will be based upon commanders and conditions. Iraq is important for our security. I will be making decisions based upon success in Iraq.

President Bush harps on this talking point alot, but this time I feel the need to call him out on it.

I'm no Robert Byrd when it comes to the constitution, but it seems to me that the Commander in Chief, aka George W. Bush, should make determinations about U.S. troop levels in Iraq. Getting advice from his military commanders is to be expected, but Bush talks about his decision making process in such a way that it always sounds like General David Petraeus, not the Commander in Chief, ultimately will decide what we're going to do in Iraq.

Besides eroding civilian control of the military, a bedrock of the American political system ingrained in our soldiers' heads from their first day at basic training, Bush's extreme deference to General Petraeus to me reeks of politics. "St. Petraeus" can do no wrong. His favorables are off the charts, probably 40 points above Bush's, and both Republicans and Democrats have demonstrated a willingness to hang on his every word and fawn on him incessantly.

Which isn't to say that he is not super-qualified and doing a great job carrying out his mission, because he is. But I think Bush uses Petraeus's popularity and credibility as political cover to separate himself from the hard decisions that need to be made about the Iraq war. In this way, Petraeus may find himself becoming more and more Colin Powell-esque as the Bush administration looks for a fall guy to help it run out the clock on Iraq."

U.S. casualties down in Baghdad, up overall

The U.S. death toll in Iraq increased in January, ending a four-month drop in casualties, and most of the deaths occurred outside Baghdad or the once-restive Anbar province, according to military statistics.

In all, 38 U.S. service members had been reported killed in January by Thursday, compared with 23 in December. Of those, 33 died from hostile action, but only nine of them in Baghdad or Anbar.

[snip]

U.S. officials in Iraq said the death toll had risen because the military was targeting armed groups that had been driven out of Baghdad and Anbar by the increase in American troops.

In January, the military launched a major offensive in Diyala province, where nine service members were killed. In addition, the United States moved troops to the northwestern Ninevah province, which has become an al Qaeda in Iraq stronghold. Seven service members were killed there in January, compared with four in December.

The fact that more Americans have been killed in those provinces has some fretting that the United States is fighting another round of ''whack-a-mole,'' a term that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., once used to describe chasing insurgents and terrorists from one part of Iraq to another.

Others argue that the drop in American deaths in Baghdad and Anbar is evidence that al Qaeda in Iraq has been weakened, and that operations such as those in Diyala and Ninevah will weaken it further.

Unless, of course, the insurgents just move from Diyala and Ninevah back to Baghdad and Anbar. When they gamed out the invasion of Iraq in the 1999 Desert Crossing exercise, they concluded that the U.S. would need 400,000 troops for this exact reason. My colleague Lt. Gen. Robert Gard and I pointed out this "whack-a-mole" deficiency of the surge back in January 2007, right after the surge was announced:

An obvious weakness of [the surge] is that focusing on securing Baghdad could simply push insurgents out of the city and into the surrounding provinces of al Anbar, Diyala, and Salah ad Din. Since the force ratios required to protect civilians in these sparsely populated regions are beyond American capacity, the U.S. will get stuck playing provincial "whack-a-mole": insurgents will be suppressed in one area only to reemerge somewhere else.

Hate to rain on everyone's parade, but the surge has produced the whack-a-mole effect we warned about. There have not been blanket, across-the-board security gains in all provinces. And there will never be enough U.S. forces in Iraq to single-handedly achieve these systematic gains, because a) we don't have more troops to send; and b) even if we did, the American public would never support another escalation.

In March 2007, Gard and I wrote:

Consider the discrepancies between previous counterinsurgencies and the current situation on the ground in Iraq. A recent study by the Brookings Institution evaluated a number of civil wars and concluded that, historically speaking, 520,000 U.S. soldiers would be required to provide the soldier to civilian ratio necessary to secure the population and isolate it from guerrillas. This number could be reduced if Iraqi Security Forces were truly in the lead as the Bush administration claims, but the reality is that these soldiers often place sectarian allegiances over loyalty to a unified Iraq.

I stand by my assessment from last year. There is no American solution in Iraq. The Iraqis must stand up and take responsibility both for their security and for their politics. U.S. policy should be structured around using whatever leverage is necessary - up to and including timetables and troop withdrawals - to hasten the day Iraqi leaders will really feel the pinch and be forced to take responsibility for their own future.

Until that day, we are left running a war by statistics - casualties up or down, attacks up or down - that is divorced from politico-strategic realities and is far too reminiscent of the way systems-analyst extraordinaire Robert McNamara ran the Vietnam War.

More than one million Iraqis killed since 2003 invasion: study

More than one million Iraqis have died because of the war in Iraq since the US-led invasion of the country in 2003, according to a study published Wednesday.

A fifth of Iraqi households lost at least one family member between March 2003 and August 2007 due to the conflict, said data compiled by London-based Opinion Research Business (ORB) and its research partner in Iraq, the Independent Institute for Administration and Civil Society Studies (IIACSS).

The study based its findings on survey work involving the face-to-face questioning of 2,414 Iraqi adults aged 18 or above, and the last complete census in Iraq in 1997, which indicated a total of 4.05 million households.

Respondents were asked how many members of their household, if any, had died as a result of the violence in the country since 2003, and not because of natural causes.

"We now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been in the order of 1,033,000," ORB said in a statement.

The margin of error for the survey was 1.7 percent, making the estimated range between 946,000 and 1.12 million fatalities.

The highest rate of deaths throughout the country occurred in Baghdad, where more than 40 percent of households had lost a family member.

According to a July 2007 estimate by the United States, Iraq's population is around 27 million.

The country has been wracked by conflict since the March 2003 invasion which deposed dictator Saddam Hussein, with United Nations estimates putting the number of displaced people from the conflict at more than four million, nearly half of which have fled to neighbouring countries.

A small number of those refugees have begun returning to Iraq -- around 20,000 arrived from Syria in December -- the Iraqi Red Crescent said earlier this month, suggesting an improved security situation.

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