There has been a lot of talk of late in the blogosphere about what Iraq casualty rates (both in terms of location and number) tell us about how the war is going. In an interesting post, Belmont Club espied reasons for optimism.
Then Andrew Sullivan wrote:
But it also seems to me that military deaths may not be the best way to analyze this. After all, the White House may well have been withdrawing troops from sensitive areas in order to minimize casualties in the run-up to elections (perhaps prior to an attack on Fallujah in November?).
To which Belmont responded:
How to square this [Sullivan's argument] with observed events? The best way to minimize American casualties in the short term would have been to withdraw them from high-combat areas like Al-Anbar Province and Sadr City and fall back onto solid perimeters or bases in the open desert. That would cut US casualties by a dramatic percentage. The empirical problem with Sullivan's hypothesis is that of the 52 Americans who have died in September the vast majority were killed in patrols, "stabilization operations" or convoys in Al-Anbar which are offensive operations (although any good defense has active patrolling). [emphasis added]
I gotta side mostly with Sullivan on this one. What the Belmont blog misses is that while offensive operations in places like Anbar Province are indeed where most of the casualties are occuring (ie, we are taking the fight to the enemy pace Belmont and contra Sullivan)--we also need to note that the scale and pace of our counter-insurgency effort has slowed down considerably--and yet casualties are still occurring at a relatively high rate.
We'll look at casualty trends below, but for now note that it's beyond doubt that there have been fewer, major counter-insurgency actions in Iraq of late. Indeed, that's been part of our new declared strategy:
"The goal is to help the Iraqi interim government gain control of those cities as soon as possible" while at the same time "we make every effort to avoid major military confrontations," says Brig. Gen. Erwin Lessel, deputy director for operations of the multinational forces in Iraq. "The more reconstruction and economic progress you have, the population migrates towards the government and away from supporting the anti-Iraq forces."
Note too, relatedly, that we are relying on airpower more (a tactic, incidentally, that often causes more undesired collateral damage than do on-the-ground counter-insurgency operations).
Indeed, when we were more robustly fighting in the Sunni Triangle back in April--we lost 140 men that month. After April, we decided to scale back from such operations for varied reasons (losing too many soldiers, international outcry if we flattened Fallujah, election(s) nearing etc). And, perhaps most important, the Army (as opposed, reportedly, to the Marines) started buying into such arguments:
...there is an innate disconnect between the requirement for security that the coalition forces must stay to implant, and the instability that the presence of these same forces causes. This disconnect will continue to grow. With the military setbacks of Kufa, Najaf and Fallujah, in which insurgents and irregular forces skillfully combined fanatical, if militarily unskilled fighting, with the use of religious terrain to battle the coalition to a standstill, Iraqis now know that the U.S. can be beaten. This combines with the inflammatory photos from Abu Ghraib to ignite widespread willingness to fight the coalition, or at least to give sanctuary to those who fight. This trend of increasing combativeness will likely grow, loosely coupled with the growing desire of foreign fighters to see the coalition, and anything associated with it, fail.
In other words, some experts advised the Army that is was better for us to a) pull out of major population centers, b) train Iraqi forces, c) have Alawi try to get some regions/towns under government control peacefully and d) failing (c), use (b) to regain said regions/towns later--rather than U.S. forces.
The problem with all this? What if doesn't work? What if the so-called ink-blot strategy is working better instead?
Look, to be sure, as Wretchard indicates, we are still engaging in a good number of offensive operations--but I think I've made it more than clear that our force posture has been materially more conservative and protective post-April. Indeed, this is likely the main reason why fatality rates have been lower in June and July--we lost almost two-thirds fewer men in those months than we lost in April.
While that's great on the level of losing fewer of our troops--it's begs a $64,000 question. That question is, if we really needed to get back into towns like Fallujah--would we be losing more troops now than we did back in April because the insurgents have re-grouped, strengthened, and are becoming (that dreaded, over-used word so loved by the New York Times!) more "sophisticated"? Unfortunately--and this goes more to Sully's point than Wretchard's--I fear the answer is yes. (Or, put another way, given the limited scope of our counter-insurgency efforts over the past summer--are we losing too many soldiers given the relatively smaller scale of our operations? Again, I think the answer is, unfortunately, yes).
P.S. Also, folks, a capital city like Baghdad is critical in all of this. You can't have foreign nationals, willy-nilly, being kidnapped from the Mansour neighborhood smack dab in the morning on their way to work. You can't have myriad suicide car bombings slaughtering new Iraqi police recruits seemingly every day. You can't have the effing perimeter of the Green Zone unsecured at this late juncture. Not only is it critical to exert real control over the capital as a strategic matter--it's also of hugely symbolic import--for us, for the international community and, yes, for the insurgents.
Listen, we're all in this together. Suger-coating and potentially dubious number-crunching exercises aren't going to win this war. Understanding (at least as best as one can judiciously ascertain) where we are right now, however, might help. And, truth be told, it ain't all that pretty. No, it's not Tet, not by a long shot. But it's not a rinky-dink little insurgency fully contained and emasculated in Anbar province either. It's something in between, and the sooner we accept that, the better for all of us.