A new assessment by the CIA and 15 other US spy agencies of Washington's counterinsurgency war in Iraq, released on August 23, argued that the addition since early February of 28,500 US troops to the 134,000-strong US occupation force has brought "measurable, but uneven improvements in security". However the report provided no statistics to support this claim.
Reporting the release of the 10-page declassified version of the spy agencies' combined National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), the US McClatchy Newspapers chain noted that the document "didn't repeat recent military assertions that civilian deaths have decreased by 50 percent. Instead, it said, 'the level of overall violence, including attacks on and casualties among civilians, remains high'."
This is confirmed by figures compiled from news reports by the widely cited US-based ICasualties.org website. These show that in the three months before the US troop "surge" began, 5457 Iraqis were killed in war-related violence (including 343 soldiers and police) — an average of 58 per day. However, in the six months after the surge began, 12,927 Iraqis were killed (1292 of them soldiers and police) — an average of 83 per day.
US commanders claim it is only since the troop build-up was completed in June that the "security" situation in Iraq has "improved". However, according to ICasualties.org, from the beginning of July to August 28, 3193 Iraqis were killed (including 295 soldiers and police). This is an average of 54 killed per day — only marginally less than the pre-surge rate.
According to the Iraqi Red Crescent Organisation, the number of Iraqis who have become internally displaced has more than doubled since the US troop surge began — soaring from 499,000 on January 1 to 1.1 million on July 31.
The US troop surge has not brought about a decline in the fatality rate for US and other occupation troops. In the six months to the end of January 2007, they died at an average rate of 2.88 per day. But between the beginning of February and the end of July, they died at an average rate of 3.38 per day.
Since then, the foreign troop fatality rate has declined, but only to its pre-surge level — 2.84 per day in July and 2.82 per day in August. Moreover, these fatalities rates were considerably higher than 12 months earlier. In July and August last year, the death rates for occupation troops were 1.48 and 2.13 per day respectively.
The NIE argued that Washington's puppet Iraqi security forces, while "more competent" than before, haven't improved enough to conduct major operations independent of US and allied foreign troops. In July, General Peter Pace, Washington's top military officer, admitted that only six of the 103 combat battalions — each with up to 700 soldiers — in the US recruited and trained Iraqi Army could be trusted to take on Iraqi resistance fighters independently of the foreign occupation forces.
The NIE's "best case" scenario for the US war on Iraq, now almost halfway through its fifth year, is that there will be a "modest decline" in Iraqi resistance attacks over the next 6-12 months, but violence across the country will "remain high" and the US-backed central government of Iraqi PM Nuri al Maliki will remain "unable to govern effectively".
Puppet government crumbling
Maliki's government has continued to crumble. On August 24, three more cabinet ministers announced their resignations. All three are members of the Iraqi National List (INL), an umbrella group of several political parties composed of secular Sunnis and Shiites.
Since April, all of the cabinet ministers from Sunni religious parties have resigned, as have the ministers aligned with powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr. Almost half of the 37 cabinet members have now quit.
Maliki's government now rests on a coalition of two pro-occupation Arab Shiite religious parties — his own Islamic Call (Dawa) Party and Abdul Aziz al Hakim's Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council — and the two pro-US Kurdish parties that rule Iraqi Kurdistan. This coalition is assured of the support of only 110 MPs in the 275-member Iraqi parliament.
Discontent with Maliki's government is also growing within the US political and military elite. On August 20, US Senate armed services committee chairperson Carl Levin called for Maliki's ouster. Levin's call was echoed the next day by Democratic Party presidential front runner Hillary Clinton.
In a widely syndicated August 24 article, Washington Post neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer — described by the London Financial Times in 2006 as "America's most influential foreign policy commentator" — branded Maliki's government a "disaster".
CNN reported on August 22 that "front-line US generals talk openly of non-democratic governmental alternatives" for Iraq, adding that "some senior US military commanders even suggest privately the entire Iraqi government must be removed by 'constitutional or non-constitutional' means and replaced with a stable, secure, but not necessarily democratic entity".
Pressure for withdrawal
Following the release of the NIE, influential US Republican Senator John Warner called on President George Bush to begin withdrawing US troops from Iraq.
The August 24 Washington Post reported that "Warner's declaration — after the Virginia senator's recent four-day trip to the Middle East — roiled the political environment ahead of a much-anticipated progress report to be delivered Sept. 11 by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq. Although Warner had already broken with Bush's strategy, this was the first time he endorsed pulling troops out by a specific date ...
"Democratic and Republican leadership aides said last night that Warner's new stance, coupled with the intelligence assessment, may have stalled any political momentum Bush seemed to have been building in recent days. Although Warner did not embrace more sweeping Democratic legislation on troop withdrawal, his call to start a pullout makes it easier for wavering Republicans to break with the president.
"At his Capitol Hill news conference, Warner, a former navy secretary and armed services committee chairman, threw Bush's own words back at him by noting that the president has said the US commitment in Iraq must not be 'open-ended'. Warner said it was time for the president to come up with an 'orderly and carefully planned withdrawal", beginning with a "symbolic" pull-out of about 5000 troops before Christmas.
While the White House immediately rejected Warner's "advice", a reduction in the size of the US occupation force will have to begin to be made anyway in the second quarter of next year.
On August 24, McClatchy reported that within the Pentagon's top brass there "is widespread agreement that the additional 28,000 US troops dispatched under the so-called surge will have to begin coming home next April when their 15-month tours will start to end".
The troop surge in Iraq has only been possible because in April this year the Pentagon extended US soldiers' tours of duty from 12 to 15 months, a move that is highly unpopular with both soldiers and their families. Extending the surge beyond April 2008 would require extending US troop rotations in Iraq from 15 to 18 months.
The McClatchy report continued: "There are now about 162,000 US troops in Iraq and, even if Bush does nothing, that number will fall to pre-surge levels of 130,000 in about a year, because of limits on the length of time soldiers can be deployed into Iraq."
Bush "has backed himself into a huge corner ... because all the way back in 2002 when they dreamed up this war, they chose not to expand the size of the US forces", Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate and professor of international relations at Boston University, told McClatchy.
The latest NIE underscored, Bacevich said, "a growing recognition that, for all practical purposes, there is no legitimate government in Iraq", and therefore "no light at the end of the tunnel".
In a desperate bid to counter mounting public pressure to begin withdrawing US troops from Iraq, in an August 22 speech Bush invoked the "catastrophic" legacy of Washington's defeat in Vietnam three decades ago to argue for "staying the course" in Iraq. Previously, Bush had adamantly denied that any similarities could be drawn between these two US wars.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser in the post-Vietnam War Carter administration, told the August 24 Financial Times that he saw a political logic in Bush's analogy: "Americans have accepted that the war in Iraq is unwinnable. But that doesn't mean they want to see images of helicopters taking off from the Green Zone and troops abandoning tanks and equipment as they retreat. Bush was appealing to America's desire to avoid another Vietnam-style humiliation, however wrong-headed his underlying analysis."
But, Brzezinski added, "by linking Iraq to Vietnam, Mr Bush has unconsciously admitted what a massive failure this war has been".