I hesitate to ask this question here for fear of the deluge of responses I’m likely to get indicating my possible penchant for delusion…but, is the situation in Iraq noticeably improving lately? I’m talking about the violence aspects of the insurgency, especially in and around the capital. The reason I ask is that this weekend we had some old friends over for Easter who recently got back state side from Iraq…and both of them claim that things have improved a lot in the last month or so. I haven’t seen anything in the news on this improvement myself and don’t know whether or not there is any reality to this anecdotal information…thus my question here.
I know a lot of people on both sides of this thing have an emotional stake in knee jerk answering this question one way or the other…but what’s the subjective reality here? IS the situation getting better? If so, are we talking about a blip in the statistics, or a real trend? If not, how much worse is it getting?
Please…I’m looking for some thoughtful responses here, not the usual anti-Bush/anti-US screed…or the pat all is good and getting better on the other side of the coin. I’m looking for some hard facts if possible…or at least some data that we can look at for possible trends.
I did a quick search this morning (I’m at work unfortunately) and couldn’t come up with anything except on IBC that seems to show a down turn in over all violence (at least wrt to deaths), but couldn’t find anything definitive one way or the other.
Well with tribes in Anbar aligning themselves with the Government, Shias protesting without resorting to violence, Sadr keeping his followers in check whilst the security plans are being established in Baghdad (Full reinforcements aren’t due until around May/July time) the constant training and equipping of Iraqi security forces, it seems to be heading into the right direction, however, there needs to be sustained momentum in the political process otherwise all of this is a moot point and won’t necessarily contribute.
There’s an article in the NYT today on this very subject. Their answer is that though things have improved incrementally in the capital, the gain has been offset by increased violence elsewhere. And politically, nothing good has happened – the same stagnation.
The short answer is that no, things are not going better, as every sensible person could have expected.
According to this site, US military casulties in the first 9 days of April are higher then the March or Febuary average (4.65/day vs 2.6-3/day). Iraqi casulties were up in March, but appear to be down in April, though its hard to tell when in April those numbers were compiled (and of course Iraqi casulties aren’t well reported, so those numbers are inaccurate by the sites own admission).
It’s worth adding that the objective facts of this article are consistent with what the Army Press is saying, just differently spun.
The real metric of success is political reconciliation, right? Everything else is just a means to that end. Has there been any positive movement on that front?
Google “situation improving in Iraq”, and you get page after page, at least 10, of various dates back to June, 2003. So, yes, clearly the situation is improving, and has been improving all along. It’s just not getting any better, is all, which makes it more difficult to assess the degree of improvement.
Yes. Consider the city of Tal Afar. A year ago it was being touted by the Bush administration as one of their major success stories – a city where a sustained American push had driven out the insurgents and restored peace and order.
Last week bombs went off in Tal Afar that killed 150 people, one of the worst such attacks in the war. This was followed up by revenge killings by local militias and the police.
We don’t have enough troops to fight a country-wide counter-insurgency. We can move into an area in force and win a local victory, but as soon as we pull out the chaos retuns. Right now Baghdad is getting better while the countryside is getting worse.
This is really a mathematical quandary. How do you design a function that’s locally increasing almost everywhere, but given any [a,b] interval above some minimum length, f(b) < f(a)?
I think the war in Iraq is the answer, with x = time, and f(x) = the situation.
I’m not sure this is quite accurate. It’s true that the tribal leaders are going after the al Qaeda foreigners but I’m not sure this means they are aligning with the government.
What we need to see is Iraqi political and religious leaders of all stripes sitting down to work things out.
It doesn’t seem to me that there is anything we can do except keep the lid on excessive violence in selectred locations. The latest report I’ve seen states that the Iraqis have not met a single one of the benchmarks that were a part of the “surge.”
Ten more US soldiers were killed in attacks around the outskirts of Baghdad this weekend. That’s in addition to attacks on civilians.
*Al-Qa’ida is resorting to harsher tactics as its popularity plummets in Anbar, claimed al-Mada. Among those new methods is the liquidation of ex-supporters who have left the organization, and different forms of collective punishment against communities that ally themselves with al-Qa’ida’s enemies.
As expected, al-Mada heralded Maliki’s visit to Ramadi, Anbar’s capital, yesterday as a sign of the faltering of al-Qa’ida. The newspaper said that the visit was “the last nail in al-Qa’ida’s coffin.” *
What this says is not that they are supporting the government but that they are glad that their own efforts against al Qaeda have been successful enough that government officials feel it’s safe to visit.
I’m looking, I’m looking. US newspapers that I read and TV I see don’t report much about what the Iraqis are doing. And they are highly unlikely to report that the Iraqi government didn’t do anything again today.
Not necessarily. Was Sherman “desperate” during his March to the Sea?
It’s certainly a desperation tactic if you destroy your own crops and cities to deny them to an advancing army. But that’s not what’s going on in Iraq. Instead the militias are using it as a way to terrorize the civilian base of their enemies.
Ask again in 20 or 30 years and a more accurate reply can be given.
This is, of course, precisely the problem. Either side can argue that only time will tell if the right course is being taken now.
The natural eagerness to get a moment-by-moment barometer is understandable but it is a poor indicator of any fundamental progress toward a permanent benefit (or lack thereof).
I posted a number of cites in the other Iraq thread that indicate trends a moving in a positive direction.
BTW, if you want to know if things are being done ‘differently’ now, you might like to know that Petraeus had very good success in Mosul with his ‘boots on the ground’ strategy. Who opposed him? Donald Rumsfeld. Petraeus’s notion that you actually need soldiers on the streets, treating Iraqis well, helping to build things, and providing tangible signs of security was contrary to Rumsfeld’s pet notion of a fast, mobile army. Plus, it contradicted Rumsfeld’s notion that the war would be won with a small number of troops. So what did Rumsfeld do? He pulled Petraeus out of the region, substituted a ‘Stryker’ battalion with 1/4 of the men who stayed in armored vehicles to patrol the streets, and everything went to hell.
Now Petraeus is back, and Rummy is gone. Petraeus is a guy the Democrats here should like - he talks a lot about how every military action has to be judged by the yardstick of whether or not it will create more enemies than it kills. When his men had to take military action adn damaged something, the first thing Petraeus would do is gather local leaders and compensate them for damages. If someone was killed, Petraeus would not hesitate to pay ‘blood money’ to the family. This also stuck in Rumsfeld’s craw, and he put a stop to it.
Petraeus is now in charge of the whole thing. It’s by no means assured that his strategy will work - even with the ‘surge’ there are still fewer soldiers per population than his own counterinsurgency field manual calls for, and the insurgency is now transitioning to civil war, which changes the rules of the game. Still, his plan IS substantially different than what was tried before, and it has a record of success both in the past and so far, in the present.
BTW, I would expect American casualties to go up - that’s not a sign of losing. Changing your strategy from ‘hit and run’ operations in armored vehicles with retreat back to base, to inserting soldiers permanently into the population puts more soldiers at risk. But it’s the only way to win an insurgency, and it should have been done three years ago. You can thank Rumsfeld for preventing it. And now it may be too late. But there’s still a chance, and Rumsfeld is gone. And now the right guy is in charge.