IS the surge in Iraq working? Consider this plain, simple and overwhelmingly power ful fact: Hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis are alive today, on Oct. 2, who’d be dead by now if there had been no surge.
There were 1,975 Iraqi civilian fatalities in August. In September, the number fell to 922 – a drop of 53 percent.
How do we know this decline is due to the surge? We can’t know for certain, of course. And there’s a caveat: The fatality reduction in September is particularly dramatic because there was no attack last month to match the horrible slaughter of hundreds of members of the Yazidi sect in August.
That attack was actually an anomaly, as it was a strike against a small subgroup of Kurds who live in a long-pacified area where there is no sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shiites and no al Qaeda activity. There is very little American troop presence there, and the troop surge is entirely focused elsewhere.
So just for the sake of argument, let’s remove the 350 Yazidi victims from the overall number of Iraqi fatalities in August. In that case, the drop in civilian casualties falls to 700 and the percentage decline falls to around 40 percent.
That’s still a stunning change for the better – though we should keep our perspective and note that this just brings the level of violence against civilians to levels we last saw in early 2006. Everybody thought we were losing the war with those kinds of casualty numbers, so it doesn’t make sense to claim that we’re winning now that we’ve returned to these depressing statistics.
But what we are seeing is the effectiveness of the surge – which was the combination of a substantial jump in the number of U.S. troops and a change in strategy that has American forces staying in cleared neighborhoods rather than returning to barracks and bases.
What happened in September is exactly what the surge was intended to accomplish. It was designed to achieve a lessening of the violence among Iraqis and an increase in security in Baghdad and neighboring areas so that the three Iraqi ethno-religious populations would have the space to achieve the political progress and reconciliation they have failed at so far.
And it represents distinct progress. As the surge force numbers were growing – from 135,000 in February to 159,000 in August – the civilian death toll in Iraq stabilized but did not decline.
The surge troop number in September was 168,000 – by far the largest number of American troops since December 2005.
And it’s worth noting that we reduced our force level dramatically after that December – from 165,000 to 130,000 – because the Iraqis had completed three rounds of democratic voting and we believed that the war was going to be superseded by a vibrant political process.
That didn’t happen, to put it mildly. Sectarian violence escalated sharply in early 2006, largely because of an al Qaeda strike against a key Shiite mosque.
This history suggests there are several possible explanations for the dramatic improvement of conditions in September.
1) It might be that the surge strategy required several months to take root and deepen to the extent that the violence would decrease dramatically.
2) It also might be that those extra 9,000 troops in September represented a tipping point – the number at which there were Americans in sufficient numbers in a sufficient number of places for the ordinary course of violence to be reversed.
We had better hope that the answer is No. 1 and not No. 2. If it is No. 2 – if the reduction in violence requires more than 160,000 troops deployed according to the surge strategy – then the Petraeus-Bush plan to reduce troop levels by 5,700 at the end of this year might wreak havoc on the positive changes.
On the other hand, if the training of the Iraqi military is going as well as recent reports indicate it is, maybe Iraqi forces can successfully replace U.S. forces in these dangerous places without degrading the effectiveness of the strategy.
For today, though, maybe it’s enough to know that the new American strategy has actually succeeded in saving hundreds of lives – and that, if the strategy continues to succeed and deepen, untold thousands will escape a murderer’s death. And millions will have the chance to live a more secure and vastly freer life than they ever imagined possible before 2003.
jpodhoretz@gmail.com