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Posted on 01/23/2005 8:34:00 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
BAGHDAD, Iraq — The United States is steadily losing ground to the Iraqi insurgency, according to every key military yardstick.
A Knight Ridder analysis of U.S. government statistics shows that through all the major turning points that raised hopes of peace in Iraq, including the arrest of Saddam Hussein and the handover of political sovereignty at the end of June, the insurgency, led mainly by Sunni Muslims, has become deadlier and more effective.
The analysis suggests that unless something dramatic changes, such as a newfound will by Iraqis to reject the insurgency or a large escalation of U.S. troop strength, the United States won't win the war.
It's axiomatic among military thinkers that insurgencies are especially hard to defeat because the insurgents' goal isn't to win in a conventional sense but merely to survive until the will of the occupying power is sapped. Recent polls already suggest an erosion of support among Americans for the war.
The unfavorable trends of the war are clear:
• U.S. military fatalities from hostile acts have risen from an average of about 17 per month just after President Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1, 2003, to an average of 82 per month.
• The average number of U.S. soldiers wounded by hostile acts per month has spiraled from 142 to 808 during the same period. Iraqi civilians have suffered even more deaths and injuries, although reliable statistics aren't available.
• Attacks on the U.S.-led coalition since November 2003, when statistics were first available, have risen from 735 a month to 2,400 in October. Air Force Brig. Gen. Erv Lessel, the multinational forces' deputy operations director, told Knight Ridder on Friday that attacks were currently running at 75 a day, about 2,300 a month, well below a spike in November during the assault on Fallujah, but nearly as high as October's total.
• The average number of mass-casualty bombings has grown from zero in the first four months of the American occupation to an average of 13 per month.
• Electricity production has been below pre-war levels since October, largely because of sabotage by insurgents, with just 6.7 hours of power daily in Baghdad in early January, according to the State Department.
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"All the trend lines we can identify are all in the wrong direction," said Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, a Washington policy-research organization. "We are not winning, and the security-trend lines could almost lead you to believe that we are losing."
The combat numbers are based mainly on Defense Department releases compiled by O'Hanlon in an Iraq Index. Despite the numbers, Lessel, the Air Force general, said that since the U.S. assault on the former rebel stronghold of Fallujah in November, "we have been making a lot of progress" against the insurgency.
He said the number of attacks, bombings and kidnappings is down from November; experienced insurgent leaders are being arrested or killed; U.S. and Iraqi forces remain on the offensive; and more Iraqis have been providing intelligence on insurgents.
Other indications that "things are turning around" include surveys that show 80 percent of Iraqis wanting to vote in next Sunday's national-assembly elections and more than 90 percent opposing violence as a solution to the crisis. In addition, the recruitment and training of Iraqi security forces are being stepped up, Lessel said.
"I don't want to paint too rosy a picture. We still have an insurgency that has a lot of capabilities," he said. "When you ask is the insurgency growing, you have to ask is it growing in terms of popular support, and I don't see that happening."
There are some additional bright spots:
• In the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad and the southern town of Najaf, the scene of intense fighting last year with Shiite Muslim rebels, millions of dollars are pouring into reconstruction efforts. Both places are now relatively peaceful.
• Some 14 million Iraqis, mostly Shiite, are registered to vote in next Sunday's elections for an interim 275-seat National Assembly. They'll choose among 111 slates comprising 7,785 candidates.
• Roughly 1,500 U.S.-funded reconstruction projects are employing more than 100,000 Iraqis, and the insurgents' campaign of attacks and threats has failed to deter sign-ups for Iraq's new security forces.
These developments, however, have had little impact on the broader trends that have moved against the United States through all the spikes and lulls in violence.
Most worrisome: the insurgency is getting larger.
At the close of 2003, U.S. commanders put the number of insurgents at 5,000. Earlier this month, Gen. Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, the director of the Iraqi intelligence service, said there are 200,000 insurgents, including at least 40,000 hard-core fighters. The rest, he said, are part-time fighters and supporters who provide food, shelter, funds and intelligence.
"Many Iraqis respect these gunmen because they are fighting the invaders," said Nabil Mohammed, a Baghdad University political-science professor.
The insurgents "are getting smarter all the time. We've seen a lot of changes in their tactics that say, one, they're getting help from outside, and two, they're learning," said Sgt. 1st Class Glenn Aldrich, 35, of Houston, a 16-year Army veteran who has been doing foot patrols in a Baghdad neighborhood.
The resistance has grown despite suffering huge casualties to overwhelming U.S. firepower, although exact statistics aren't available.
Insurgent attacks have shifted from small groups of men shooting at tanks with AK-47s to powerful car bombs and roadside explosives, and well-planned assaults, kidnappings and assassinations.
American soldiers have subdued Sunni hotbeds including Fallujah and Samarra. Yet these military victories have failed to achieve the broader goal of weakening the resistance.
Some Iraqis say these aggressive U.S. military moves are counterproductive because mass destruction and the killing of Iraqis, such as what happened in the two battles for Fallujah, create more recruits for the insurgency.
"The insurgency will grow larger," said Ghazi Bada al-Faisal, an employee of the Iraqi Ministry of Industry and a Fallujah resident. "The child whose brother and father were killed in the fighting will now seek revenge."
Some defense analysts are calling for a new strategy and more troops.
"We can only control the ground we stand on. We leave, and it falls apart," said Jeffrey White, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst at the Washington Center for Near East Policy.
White proposes sending 20,000 more troops, but the Bush administration hopes to replace U.S. troops with well-trained Iraqis.
In late 2003, Iraqi recruits, many of them young and looking for a paycheck, were pushed through a week or so of training, given guns and uniforms and then declared graduated.
Bush administration officials say the program to train and equip new Iraqi security forces of more than 272,000 members is making progress. Yet several independent experts said it would take at least two years before there are any meaningful numbers of Iraqi forces with counterinsurgency skills and as many as five years before the U.S. goal is attained.
"I think you can achieve success, but it will take a while and, unfortunately, there will be a lot more blood," said Peter Khalil, who was a senior security adviser to the U.S.-led occupation authority in Iraq.
Of course, success isn't assured and the United States will be forced to deal with an elected Iraqi government that may set limits on what U.S. troops can do — and could even ask them to leave.
Hopes that the election might lead to less violence have recently given way to more dire warnings, with expectations that Sunni insurgents who feel disenfranchised in the new Iraq will turn their guns on the elected government.
"I think that we will enter a different, but still-dangerous period in the post-election time frame," Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, said last week.
This one needed a MEGA-BARF Alert tag. The legacy media are beneath contempt.
Geez, I thought the election rhetoric was over. I see the fantasies of the left are not.
This isn't a Knight Ridder analysis, it's a Brookings Institute analysis dressed up in figures culled by Knight Ridder.
Biden: US Losing Illegitimate Iraq War
Who's Responsible for Losing the Media War in Iraq?
Are these the same people who bitch when their football team is ahead 42-7...at halftime?
The pic on your personal page shows eloquently "Why we fight".
It's always easier to destroy than to build. That's the advantage of "asymmetric" or guerilla war.
Instead of just saying "Nononononononono!"...are these stats true?
"The United States is steadily losing ground to the Iraqi insurgency"
Taking a page right out of Walter Cronkite's statements about Vietnam. This is just incredible.
The left's treachery continues.
This also appeared in the Orange County Register Sunday, but they didn't put it on their website.......so a lot of people are seeing it!
So we ought to know about it being a circulating story...
Amen to that!
I don't know....looking for help on that fact.
Whatever.
The rug pilots in the Middle Waste are being given their last chance, with GWB's "experiment" in Iraq: Join the 21st Century, or face annihilation.
Nobody's going to bother to try force-feeding them "Democracy" again, if they blow this one.
Know anything about these statistics?
Crap Weasel Alert
It landed on the front page of our paper, so it was circulated on the KR budget wire.
This terrorist insurgency in Iraq is doomed to fail and will be crushed for the following reasons:
They are only supported by a minority among a the Arab Sunni who are a minority to begin with.
They do not have any geographical depth, they are only concentrated in central Iraq.
They do not have any organized leadership.
Their actions is leading to absolutely nothing. Sending car bombs to kill civilians and cutting people head do not win war, it have never succeeded because it has zero significance militarily or politically.
A group of twenty or thirty thousands terrorists cannot win against the mightiest military in history of mankind, the US military. Any person who believes otherwise is a complete idiot.
The defeated Liberals and their whores in the DLM (Defeated Liberal Media) are hallucinating about making Iraq President Bush Vietnam. Their hate toward President and their insane delusion is going to finish them once and for all in the next four years.
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Mr. Gerecht talked about his book The Islamic Paradox: Shiite Clerics, Sunni Fundamentalists, and the Coming of Arab Democracy, published by American Enterprise Institute Press. The author discusseed the modern Arab world and argues that those who have hated the U.S. the most will in fact be responsible for spreading democracy throughout the Middle East. He further asserted that Americans should befriend the Shiites to successfully spread democratic ideals. Following his remarks Mr. Gerecht was joined by Michael Doran, Salameh Nematt, Jackson Diehl, and Thomas Carothers to discuss his ideas and answer questions from the audience..
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