The Opinionated Bastard

Starting at the top, we can see that most of the deaths every month come from IEDs or “Improvised Explosive Devices”. There are several reasons for this:

• Improved Body Armor for the troops has made our troops harder to outright kill instead of wounding. Short of an explosion, our troops mostly receive flesh wounds.
• The insurgents aren't really capable of standing up to U.S. troops directly. So more of their efforts go into harassment like IEDs, because that's about all they can do.
• Deaths from bullets mostly come from when we conduct operations against the insurgents, they don't come looking for us.

So if you look at the next line, you can somewhat tell the operational tempo of the troops by that brown line. When its high, the troops are busy, when its low, they're planning or regrouping.

Until now. This September, the troops in Iraq began a huge operation to roll the insurgents out of the entire Euphrates river valley. That is, pretty much, the troops started at the Syrian border and they've been rolling towards Baghdad. Starting at the border was a calculated decision I suspect. By starting at the border and sweeping towards Baghdad, we prevent any insurgents from fleeing across a border that has been notoriously difficult to control. Instead, we're going to crush them between the troops rolling along the valley and the troops in Baghdad. The insurgents haven't realized they ultimately have nowhere to run yet; they've grown used to just fleeing to the next town over. We're not letting them do that any more.

We've also been using more aerial bombardment: first they let the civilians evacuate from a town or neighborhood, then they bomb the hell out of the remaining insurgents. Classic US Military tactics dating back to WWII. Bomb the enemy (expensive but casualty-free), send in infantry to mop up anyone left, advance, repeat. As they leave an area, they leave elements of the Iraqi police and Army in charge of the rear. This actually works better then if we tried to hold the territory ourselves, because to an Iraqi, the insurgents are obvious in the same way that its obvious to me when a person in Flagstaff is a local or a tourist.

It's almost as if they're playing Risk, leaving one Iraqi army unit to hold the territory as they sweep forward in a massed attack on the next country. This is standard for an occupation force, but the interesting thing is that we haven't been doing this until now.

Instead, we've been merely doing enough military actions to keep the insurgents off-balance while we rebuilt Iraq. That seems to be stopping now, instead, we are rolling up the insurgents before us.

Which in hindsight lets us see the overall strategy in Iraq. We had two choices when we went into Iraq:

1. Send in 500,000 troops, occupy the country with an iron first, put in a puppet government and leave. (The Vietnam strategy)
2. Send in 150,000 troops, build a government, build a police force, then let the Iraqis occupy their own country. Then leave.

Osama Bin Laden and Saddam would no doubt have preferred we do the first because it would have played right into their hands. We didn't do that, we chose Door #2, and that has made all the difference. Of course, we've had a long, slow, slog in Iraq as we did all this; Iraq is still waiting on a constitution. But the second strategy is much preferable. For one thing, the language barrier is just too huge in Iraq. Unlike Germany in WWII where many GIs spoke German; in Iraq, doing a total occupation of Iraq would have been a disaster. Slow and steady, painful as it has been to watch, was the right strategy. No doubt it will turn out in the end to have been the faster strategy; we were in Vietnam for years.

To quote General Petraeus' quoting TE Lawrence: Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not win it for them.

But I think we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, because even though we stepped up operations against the insurgents, all the statistics have gone down for the month. We're rolling up the remaining insurgents, and the numbers show it because even with more activity on our part, we've lost fewer soldiers. This is true of the Iraqi police as well, only 233 Iraqi military and Police were killed in September, which is the second month in a row this number has decreased and the lowest number since April when the IP were substantially less active.

So even though since May, everything but IED deaths have been steadily decreasing, I think that we'll look back at September and see it as the turning point in the war. In the book Butterfly Economics Paul Ormerod has a chart showing how crime rates can dramatically shift between a constant high crime level down to a low crime level. What happens is that past a certain point, being a criminal no longer makes sense. At that point, I think that's what's going on in Iraq right now. We've brought Iraq to the point where being an insurgent no longer makes sense. Its important to realize we don't have to arrest/kill every insurgent. It's quite OK if they just go home and become “political activists”.

So September has been the beginning of the end to the war. Of course, there is still much work to be done, Iraq to some extent has shifted from an insurgency to a civil war, but I think that only elections can truly resolve those issues. The fact that fewer Iraqi police are being killed is a good sign; but civilian deaths haven't gone up or down dramatically. Al Queda has made several attempts to make the low-key civil war in Iraq worse, but since they keep announcing “We're trying to start a civil war” they're not having much success. The October 15th election is coming up, with the December 15th election after that, one of those elections will be the death knell for the civil war.

Some references:

• A Soldier in Iraq talks about the Iraqi Army
• Bill Roggio has been covering the latest operations
• The Brookings Institute Iraq Index
• Belmont Club has some Maps
• General Petraeus' Speaking at Princeton
• My Previous article
• Seeing if this trackback thing works