Surging to success in Iraq

John Podhoretz:

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.

...

Just as this strategy is starting to show signs of progress the Washington Post says that most Americans want to return to the old failed policy of the past. I suspect poll bias. It is hard to believe that the majority of Americans could be that wrong. The same poll showed that a majority also favored the Democrats ridiculous health care expansion. If the poll is accurate, that is a bad sign for America.

Update: Jim Gerahty takes a closer look at the numbers in the Washington Post poll and finds they something quite different from the headline and the story. Only a minority of those polls, 43 percent, want to pull out faster than Gen. Petraeus has recommended. The polls shows that 52 percent want the same pace as recommended by Gen. Petraeus or slower.