There's not much point in rehashing every month the usual dispute about what's responsible for the drop in casualties or whether the drop is meaningful in the absence of political progress.

Actually, correctly identifying the cause is the first step to finding the best solution.

In other news, Ahmadinejad gets the flowers, hugs, and kisses we were supposed to get upon liberating Iraq. "Isn't it ridiculous that those who have deployed 160,000 troops in Iraq accuse us of intervening there?"

awesome! now we're back to 2005 levels. remember 2005, where things we going so well that the administration was pressured into forming the Iraq Study Group to try to find a way to turn the situation around ?

progress

AJ above is right on the money. If the main causes of the drop in deaths are the de facto the concrete barriers in Baghdad that divide the capital along Shia and Sunni lines, and the deals with the murderers of American soldiers, it is intellectually dishonest and perhaps even morally questionable of Mr. Drum to show the chart which clearly suggests the case to be otherwise.

Cleek makes a damn good point. We're now supposed to believe that re-achieving the totally unacceptable violence levels of 2005 is a victory?

Frankly, it's obvious what will happen here. The political dynamic in Iraq is that there isn't a legitimate governing body, and there are a lot of factions with guns and profound grievances against other factions. It's a classic powder keg, and every dead body makes it worse, because that's another family that honestly believes they will literally die if the other side gains an advantage.

For the foreseeable future, things are going to cycle through "incredibly violent" and "less violent, with the threat of incredible violence on the horizon," depending on totally short-term factors and short-term calculations from military/political leaders looking out for their faction and their self-interest only, as well as wild cards like local extremist factions doing something incredibly destabilizing and provoking like another Golden Mosque.

In that light, it's perfectly obvious that the surge isn't a strategic victory--it's a regression to the mean level of violence for this conflict. A level of violence which will ebb and flow for the foreseeable future.

This invasion is a strategic catastrophe. The US is now in a position where bad tactical choices will make this situation into a firestorm, and fantastic pitch-perfect tactical ones will have a small marginal impact on Iraq's progress towards a stable state. Furthermore, we'll get zero credit from the Iraqis or anyone else if this thing works out, largely because while causing it to fail is within our control, causing Iraq to succeed is almost entirely not.

So, don't be surprised when the violence upticks again. It almost certainly won't be our fault--we're actually doing a good job lately of not throwing gasoline on the fire--but we'll also have little power to stop it. We're gonna have bad strings of months, and good strings of months, because that's what it's like when you're the occupying force in a fundamentally un-stable and un-governed state.

Oh, and as an aside, Osama bin Laden is still on the loose. He still hates us, he still has followers, and we really haven't dealt with that, because we've been so busy erecting concrete barriers in Baghdad.

I expect that little strategic oversight is gonna bite us in the ass.

It's the occupation stupid.

Shorter Kevin: As a result of the surge, the violence has receded to Summer 2005 levels. We win. Can we go home now?

Clee is largely correct, although the push for the Iraq Study Group was 2006. We are about back to pre Golden Mosque bombing levels. But that is probably deceptive, ethnic cleansing is now nearly complete, that has had an impact on the numbers. And the strategy of buying off different factions (Anbar Awakening) has had some success. As have military reversals for AlQaeda in Iraq. It is pretty tough to separate out the contributions of the different factors.

Meanwhile, Iraq is still hurting. Our all-but broken army is not recovering. Our treasury (as well as servicemen) continue to bleed. .. But Iraq is rarely in the news, so it drops in the public consiousness.

The chart claims that "Al Qaeda bombed the Golden Mosque." Isn't that amazing. Al Qaeda, what there is of it, wasn't even in Iraq when the Shi'ite Askariya Mosque was destroyed on February 22nd, 2006 in Samarra, a predominantly Sunni city.

Samarra was under total US military control. The curfew in Samarra started at 8pm. On February 21st, at 8:30pm, according to a witness, joint forces of the Iraq National Guard and the American Army appeared, then left at 9, then reappeared at 11pm. At 6am on the morning of the 22nd the ING left the area, and at 6:30 the Americans left. The first explosion occurred at 6:40, the second at 6:45.am.

Subsequently hundreds of Sunni mosques came under attack and a full-fledged civil war was initiated.

Construction Minister Jassem Mohammed Jaafar, who toured Sammara and inspected the damage incurred to the shrine, said the placing of explosives inside the dome was meticulous and must have taken at least 12 hours."Holes were dug into the mausoleum's four main pillars and packed with explosives," he told the media, adding that work on each pillar must have taken at least four hours. The normal security detail of 35 men had been reduced to five, the five guards were taken hostage during the twelve hours, and nobody noticed anything.

Hoping to find answers and interview residents of Sammara, the Al-Arabiya news network dispatched three of its journalists, including former Aljazeera reporter Atwar Bahjat, herself a native of the ancient city. Sources in Iraq say she was interviewing residents when a truck full of unknown armed men abducted her as she screamed for help. Bahjat, 30, of mixed Sunni-Shia heritage, was found executed outside Sammara, along with her cameraman and sound technician. Her field equipment and video were missing.

Divide and conquer, and blame that nasty al Qaeda.

One source reports that 850,000 more Iraqis became refugees since the bombing of the mosque and the beginning of the surge. There are almost 4.5 million refugees now -- almost one out of five Iraqis has been displaced. That's ethnic cleansing on a huge scale. These people fled their homes to avoid extermination. It is not meaningful to be talking about casualty level trends without at the same time talking about this displaced population.

It seems to me that the drop in casualties, both civilian and military, is mostly due to two factors: the Sunni Awakening, and Sadr's ceasefire.

But since these two factors have coincided with the surge, it's difficult to make the case to people that the surge isn't the primary cause in the drop in violence.

No one has pressed Patreaus or McCain to explain how the surge caused the Sunni Awakening or Sadr's ceasefire, and until someone does, the conventional wisdom will be "the surge must be working".

Well Joe, we have that problem in spades. JoeSixpack isn't interested in complex breakdowns, we had a well advertised surge, and things got better (and off the nightly news). This is what I fear with Obama's AlQaeda in Iraq didn't exist prior to the invasion argument. Its truth is lost with the soundbite type logic (it has a very similar name, and it hates us). I fear we could be outcampaigned on this very issue. Having truth on your side only works if the voters can distinguish truth from propaganda.

a carpet of bombs which made somebody a carpet of gold

We've got five years, stuck on my eyes
We've got five years, what a surprise
We've got five years, my brain hurts a lot
We've got five years, that's all we've got

"Five Years" - David Bowie

The Myth of the Surge:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18722376/the_myth_of_the_surge

The short story:
Iraq is a huge mess.

The Iraqi government is not functional.

Our people are still dying.

We are spending 2 to 3 BILLION DOLLARS a WEEK.

IF this is success I would hate to see the Repub definition of failure.

Yay, the brutal occupation is down to killing 400 Iraqi civilians a month. Lucky for them we are there. Can you imagine how bad it would be if they were forced to live under a genocidal dictator? Sure, they'd have more electricity, more doctors, and in fact more infrastructre in general. And sure, they would be living with a lower violent death rate. Wait, did the warmongers have a point here? They managed to take over from a genocidal dictator and make things worse. What a bunch of fuck heads.

400 human beings. All of them civilians. And none of the cowardly supporters of the war on the Iraqi people can explain why those innocents had to die.

Things are worse in Iraq but not in the lives of Bush's business friends who are making lots and lots of money. Our guys didn't die in vain; Dick Cheney now lives in a $2,900,000 house bought with Halliburton dividends.

Less people left. Sigh.

As Kevin says, there's no point in rehashing the arguments, so I won't. I just want to thank Kevin for providing this chart.

"Here, then, are two portraits of Dora, as a living place and as a dead one. Of course, both authors are surely being selective to some degree, and both are contrasting the Dora they see today with an earlier version of the place. For Rosen, it is a once-pleasant, upscale neighborhood that, thanks to George Bush, descended into hell. For Hesgeth, it is a one-time battlefield against barbaric jihadis that is rising from its ashes.

More practically, however, the contrast is in part a function of time: Rosen walked through Dora in December, whereas Hesgeth is there now. In the intervening months, Baghdad has been changing. Life is returning to areas, like Dora, that had been largely deserted and frozen in fear.

I have a third witness I can call to testify in the case of Dora, someone who has lived in the neighborhood all along. He’s a cousin of mine, a physician who stayed in Dora even in its most difficult days. Throughout the horror that beset that part of town, he tended his patients as best he could.

How bad was it then? Each day before leaving his wife and small children to go to the hospital, my cousin said the Shehada, the essential assertion of Muslim belief, as if in preparation for death. I asked him recently whether Dora had gotten any better since those days.

"Makoo nisba," he said in Iraqi dialect. There’s no comparison.""

http://iraqpundit.blogspot.com/

400 human beings. All of them civilians.

To put this in perspective, that would be the equivalent of 4000 deaths a month in the US.

(Not even accounting for the fact that 400 deaths is probably a gross underestimate because so many deaths go unreported).

Yeah, "ex-liberal" (fucking liar), let's not rehash the reasons why idiots like you have generated a situation where hundreds of innocent people are murdered every month. It might make you feel bad about supporting unprovoked assaults on nations with no credible evidence that even the illegal "preventative warfare" doctrine applied.

No, rather than reflecting on your previous idiocy, let us simply take your advice now. Let us listen to the wise words of those too fucking stupid to know that the people responsible for security in a conquered nation are the conquerers.

What would be best here would be for you and yours to slink away under cover of night and to no longer participate in the political process above the level of mindless TV watching. You have destroyed a nation, you have spent a trillion dollars that could have gone to improving the world on your brutality, and you have demonstrated to the world (if an insufficient number of Americans) that you are in no way competent to address world affairs.