The U.S. death toll in Iraq increased in January, ending a four-month drop in casualties, and most of the deaths occurred outside Baghdad or the once-restive Anbar province, according to military statistics.
In all, 38 U.S. service members had been reported killed in January by Thursday, compared with 23 in December. Of those, 33 died from hostile action, but only nine of them in Baghdad or Anbar.
[snip]
U.S. officials in Iraq said the death toll had risen because the military was targeting armed groups that had been driven out of Baghdad and Anbar by the increase in American troops.
In January, the military launched a major offensive in Diyala province, where nine service members were killed. In addition, the United States moved troops to the northwestern Ninevah province, which has become an al Qaeda in Iraq stronghold. Seven service members were killed there in January, compared with four in December.
The fact that more Americans have been killed in those provinces has some fretting that the United States is fighting another round of ''whack-a-mole,'' a term that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., once used to describe chasing insurgents and terrorists from one part of Iraq to another.
Others argue that the drop in American deaths in Baghdad and Anbar is evidence that al Qaeda in Iraq has been weakened, and that operations such as those in Diyala and Ninevah will weaken it further.
Unless, of course, the insurgents just move from Diyala and Ninevah back to Baghdad and Anbar. When they gamed out the invasion of Iraq in the 1999 Desert Crossing exercise, they concluded that the U.S. would need 400,000 troops for this exact reason. My colleague Lt. Gen. Robert Gard and I pointed out this "whack-a-mole" deficiency of the surge back in January 2007, right after the surge was announced:
An obvious weakness of [the surge] is that focusing on securing Baghdad could simply push insurgents out of the city and into the surrounding provinces of al Anbar, Diyala, and Salah ad Din. Since the force ratios required to protect civilians in these sparsely populated regions are beyond American capacity, the U.S. will get stuck playing provincial "whack-a-mole": insurgents will be suppressed in one area only to reemerge somewhere else.
Hate to rain on everyone's parade, but the surge has produced the whack-a-mole effect we warned about. There have not been blanket, across-the-board security gains in all provinces. And there will never be enough U.S. forces in Iraq to single-handedly achieve these systematic gains, because a) we don't have more troops to send; and b) even if we did, the American public would never support another escalation.
In March 2007, Gard and I wrote:
Consider the discrepancies between previous counterinsurgencies and the current situation on the ground in Iraq. A recent study by the Brookings Institution evaluated a number of civil wars and concluded that, historically speaking, 520,000 U.S. soldiers would be required to provide the soldier to civilian ratio necessary to secure the population and isolate it from guerrillas. This number could be reduced if Iraqi Security Forces were truly in the lead as the Bush administration claims, but the reality is that these soldiers often place sectarian allegiances over loyalty to a unified Iraq.
I stand by my assessment from last year. There is no American solution in Iraq. The Iraqis must stand up and take responsibility both for their security and for their politics. U.S. policy should be structured around using whatever leverage is necessary - up to and including timetables and troop withdrawals - to hasten the day Iraqi leaders will really feel the pinch and be forced to take responsibility for their own future.
Until that day, we are left running a war by statistics - casualties up or down, attacks up or down - that is divorced from politico-strategic realities and is far too reminiscent of the way systems-analyst extraordinaire Robert McNamara ran the Vietnam War.
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