Nearly 200 Iraqis died this week, according to the Iraq Body Count criteria. That's about the average in 2005. (The Iraq Body Count acknowledges that its is an undercount.)

There has still been no political progress which would consolidate and possibly maintain what gains there have been. New trouble spots are emerging - Sunni versus Shia in various places, Turkish bombing in 'Kurdistan', and religious-fanatic thugs taking over in Basra.

I would say that that kind of information makes the statement 'the surge is working' an over-optimistic oversimplification. And I don't think anyone here wants to see high death tolls for any people involved.

"I'm sorry if this disturbs those who want to see the American death toll as high as possible."

I seriously doubt if any Iraqi nationals or any terrorists visit AP.

I am very grateful that American deaths are down, but that proves nothing about the Surge. It's purpose was not to lower the number of US death. It was to give the Iraqi government time to get some things done with regard to running their own country. The Surge is giving them that time, but no one who doesn't have a dog in the fight is saying that the Iraqi government is accomplishing anything of import. The last I read, another faction is boycotting Parliament.

'A new troubling myth has taken hold in Washington and it is critical that the record is set straight. According to the mainstream media, Republicans, and unfortunately even some Democrats, the President's surge in Iraq has been a resounding success. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

This assertion is disingenuous, factually incorrect, and negatively impacts America's national security. The Surge had a clear and defined objective - to create stability and security - enabling the Iraqi government to enact lasting political solutions and foster genuine reconciliation and cooperation between Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds.

This has not happened...' A Surge of More Lies

NNN, you just can't accept any success in Iraq can you? Pity, I think you are going to drive yourself crazy hoping to prove your point about the surge. Most of us see the success that it has produced, but keep trying as least you have yourself fooled.

I think we should define "success" in terms of the Surge if we are going to discuss whether or not it is a success. If "success" means a lessening of the violence to the levels it was at a year or so ago, then it certainly is working. If "success" means lessening the levels of violence in order to allow the government to start acting as a government, the Surge doesn't seem to be working.

Another unanswered question is "What happens after the Surge?" If the violence remains lower than it was pre-Surge, but no real progress is made by the Iraqi government, did the Surge work? If the violence returns to pre-Surge levels after the extra 30,000 or so troops leave Iraq, did the Surge work? Did it accomplish the goals of the US government?

quote:

Originally posted by Dorian Greyed.

Another unanswered question is "What happens after the Surge?" If the violence remains lower than it was pre-Surge, but no real progress is made by the Iraqi government, did the Surge work? If the violence returns to pre-Surge levels after the extra 30,000 or so troops leave Iraq, did the Surge work? Did it accomplish the goals of the US government?

______________________________________________

Hi dg:

Since almost all of the Presidential candidates have promised to begin troop withdrawals shortly after being elected,we have no idea what troop withdrawals will have on the Iraq situation.None of us knows what will happen.

As far as political progress in concerned ,I agree we have done a lousy job of making the Iraquis take over the actual running of their country.That will have to change.

But we still have the problem of maintaining a sizeable force to protect our new super Iraqui embassy,plus troops to maintain the four permanent bases we are building in Iraq.

If elected ,this alone should make Hillary "shed a few tears".

We are still in deep doo-doo for years to come,no matter who gets elected.

hippolips

'There is little doubt that violence in Iraq, and especially in Baghdad and al Anbar province, has fallen dramatically...

...Even Petraeus, however, cautions that declarations of victory are premature, not only because of the scheduled withdrawal of the 30,000 surge troops over the next six months, but also because the tactics he has employed have not yet translated into real progress at the national level in achieving the reconciliation that Bush set as the strategic objective one year ago.

Indeed, the Pentagon's top Middle East aide, Mark Kimmitt, told the right-wing Heritage Foundation earlier this week that 2008 will likely be "far more difficult" than 2007 because Washington will have to "depend far more on the Iraqis themselves" to achieve reconciliation. He rated the chances of sustaining the security gains achieved during the past year at only "50-50".

That appears to be the assessment of many independent observers, including some key surge boosters, such as McCaffrey, who has also expressed doubt as to whether the surge's gains on the security front are sustainable in the face of the U.S. drawdown and the absence of progress on the political front...' On Anniversary, Views of Surge

Some good news on the political front - Ban eased on Saddam-era officials

'Highly promising figures that the administration cited to demonstrate economic progress in Iraq last fall, when Congress was considering whether to continue financing the war, cannot be substantiated by official Iraqi budget records, the Government Accountability Office reported Tuesday...

...after Iraq’s failure to spend its own money on reconstruction was first disclosed in late 2006, Iraqi and American officials repeatedly asserted that the problems would be much less severe the next year, as the new government led by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki found its way.

In addition, the officials said, with the American troop increase and security improvements, security problems would lessen. And American training programs were producing more skilled Iraqi contracting and finance officials. The figures put forth in September appeared to endorse those claims.

But the accountability office figures, which Mr. Christoff said were taken directly from Finance Ministry records, show that through August 2007 the Iraqi government had spent less than half the percentage of its investment budget that it had spent in the same period in 2006...' Iraqi Spending to Rebuild Has Slowed, Report Says

'Iraq faces a period of economic growth and political progress, according to assessments by the International Monetary Fund and the UN...

...Mohsin Khan, director of the IMF's Middle East and Central Asia department, said Iraqi GDP growth would likely top 7% this year and hold at between 7% and 8% next year.

"Of course all of this is conditional on oil production expansion and the security situation improving," he said.' Agencies see good year for Iraq

'Only this week, Abdul Qadir, the Iraqi defense minister, announced that "his nation would not be able to take full responsibility for its internal security until 2012, nor be able on its own to defend Iraq's borders from external threat until at least 2018." Pentagon officials, reported Thom Shanker of the New York Times, expressed no surprise at these dismal post-surge projections, although they were "even less optimistic than those [Qadir] made last year."

According to this guesstimate then, the U.S. military occupation of Iraq won't end for, minimally, another ten years. President Bush confirmed this on his recent Mideast jaunt when, in response to a journalist's question, he said that the U.S. stay in Iraq "could easily be" another decade or more...

...In order to achieve an image of lifelike quiescence in Iraq, involving a radical lowering of “violence” in that country, the general and ambassador did have to give up the ghost on a number of previous Bush administration passions. Rebellious al-Anbar Province was, for instance, essentially turned over to members of the community (many of whom had, even according to the Department of Defense, been fighting Americans until recently). They were then armed and paid by the U.S. not to make too much trouble. In the Iraqi capital, on the other hand, the surging American military looked the other way as, in the first half of 2007, the Shiite “cleansing” of mixed Baghdad neighborhoods reached new heights, transforming it into a largely Shiite city. This may have been the real “surge” in Iraq and, if you look at new maps of the ethnic make-up of the capital, you can see the startling results — from which a certain quiescence followed. Powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a longtime opponent of the Bush administration, called a “truce” during the surge months and went about purging and reorganizing his powerful militia, the Mahdi Army. In exchange, the U.S. has given up, at least temporarily, its goal of wresting control of some of those neighborhoods from the Sadrists.

Despite hailing the recent passage of what might be called a modest re-Baathification law in the Iraqi Parliament (that may have little effect on actual government employment), the administration has also reportedly given up in large part on pushing its highly touted “benchmarks” for the Iraqis to accomplish. This was to be a crucial part of Iraqi political “reconciliation” (once described as the key to the success of the whole surge strategy). It has now been dumped for so-called Iraqi solutions. All of this, including the lack of U.S. patrolling in al-Anbar province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency, plus the addition of almost 30,000 troops in Baghdad and environs, has indeed given Iraq a quieter look — especially in the United States, where Iraqi news has largely disappeared from front pages and slipped deep into prime-time TV news coverage just as the presidential campaign of 2008 heats up...' CSI Iraq

'About 75% of Baghdad's neighborhoods are now secure, a dramatic increase from 8% a year ago when President Bush ordered more troops to the capital, U.S. military figures show.
The military classifies 356 of Baghdad's 474 neighborhoods in the "control" or "retain" category of its four-tier security rating system, meaning enemy activity in those areas has been mostly eliminated and normal economic activity is resuming...' 75% of Baghdad areas now secure



'Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army militia might not renew its six-month ceasefire, a key cause of the decline in violence in Iraq, unless attacks against it stop, a Sadr aide said on Saturday...'
Sadr followers reconsidering ceasefire

More signs of movement on the political front, but in a new kind of direction, maybe:

Nationalists Stirring in Iraq

'...President George Bush said yesterday that the US could slow the pace of troop withdrawals from Iraq if commanders on the ground considered it necessary...

...In the past week, 5,000 US and Iraqi troops have launched an offensive to clear al-Qa'ida militants from Diyala province, north of Baghdad, which the research group Iraq Body Count says is now the most violent in Iraq. But military experts have warned that pacifying Diyala, with a mixed population of Sunnis, Shias and Kurds, will be far more difficult than in Anbar – the success story of the "surge" – which is almost exclusively Sunni.' www.independent.co.uk

'... America’s military adventure in Iraq is even less sustainable than it was in Vietnam.

In 1968, the United States had a military draft and a surplus of 18-year-olds, and it had yet to commit any of its Reserve or National Guard units to the war. Today, the United States has 160,000 troops in Iraq, many of them reservist and national guard forces (not counting Blackwater and other hired guns). Regardless of the situation on the ground, these troops will soon be coming to the end of their 15-month tours of duty. There is no draft and no possibility of instituting one, and there are not enough fresh units to replace those in the field. The military is finding it hard to keep up enlistments, even with lowered standards, and junior officers are refusing to re-up.

U.S. military commanders are aware that maintaining, never mind increasing, U.S. forces in Iraq is a logistical impossibility. And so are the Iraqis...' Iraq of '08 eerily like Vietnam of '68

'With the ink on the newspapers parroting the president’s words barely dry, evidence of his misrepresentation of reality begins to build with the announcement by the Pentagon that troop levels in Iraq will not be dropping, as had been projected in view of the “success” of the “surge,” but rather holding at current levels with the possibility of increasing in the future. This reversal of course concerning troop deployments into Iraq highlights the reality that the statistical justification of “surge success,” namely the reduction in the level of violence, was illusory, a temporary lull brought about more by smoke and mirrors than any genuine change of fortune on the ground. Even the word surge is inappropriate for what is now undeniably an escalation. Iraq, far from being a nation on the rebound, remains a mortally wounded shell..' Iraq’s Tragic Future

So, actually, are US troop numbers in Iraq going to go up, down or stay steady?

From nnn's article, a statement of the legacy bush leaves the US and the world:

"We have no alternative but to fight this occupation and its allies," a former army officer in Baghdad speaking on condition of anonymity told IPS. "We can see clearly now that Americans came with the idea that we, Sunni Arabs, are the enemies they have in mind no matter what we do to please them. We will fight for our existence, and this massacre will not go unpunished."

"We know they will get away with their crime now, but we will teach our children that America and the whole West are our enemies, so that they take revenge for these crimes," 35-year-old Nada, a woman who has relatives in the village told IPS."

quote:

Originally posted by newnickname:
More Bombing Creates New Enemies

Oh dear. There was a moment when some of us were deluded enough to think that the US had learned from its past mistakes and would not repeat them. Isn't that what Petraeus was supposed to be about?

Come to think of it, didn't someone in the White House or Pentagon say recently, and pointedly, that Petraeus was not the only general giving advice ?

'Members of U.S.-allied citizen brigades, which are credited with helping to tamp down violence in many parts of Iraq, went on strike Friday in Diyala province, alleging that the provincial police chief there is running a death squad...

...The citizens groups also are demanding that the heavily Shiite police force be remade into one that reflects the composition of the mixed Sunni-Shiite province, that detained people not convicted of crimes be released and that Sunnis who return to Shiite-dominated areas from which they've been displaced be protected...' www.mcclatchydc.com

Diyala province does seem a little more complex than al Anbar.