Operation Iraqi Freedom: Year Five

Almost one year ago to the day, I posted my general assessment of the status of Operation Iraqi Freedom. That assessment was re-posted on this blog on May 11, 2008. In the year that has passed, much has changed in Iraq. Most notably, the "Surge" conducted by Gen. David Petraeus at the behest of President George W. Bush has been an unqualified success.

When President Bush announced the Surge on January 10, 2007, stating that 20,000 additional troops (as of January 2007, there were 132,000 troops in Iraq) would be sent to Iraq as part of a plan to curb sectarian violence in Baghdad and al-Anbar province. Two of Bush's most vocal Democratic critics, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, sent a letter to him on January 5, 2007 stating, "Surging forces is a strategy that you have already tried and that has already failed. Like many current and former military leaders, we believe that trying again would be a serious mistake." One day after Bush announced the Surge, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) deemed it to be, "The most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam."

Despite such expected criticisms, Bush went ahead with the plan and by March 20, 2007, US troop strength was up to 152,000. However, an additional 7,00 troops were scheduled for deployment to Iraq, as the Pentagon stated earlier that month that the Surge would require a total increase of 28,500 troops. By June 15, 2007, all of the additional troops were in place and Surge operations were ready to commence. Even so, on April 19, 2007 Sen. Reid had already declared the war "lost" and on June 13, 2007 a group of leading Congressional Democrats had deemed the Surge a failure, though it had not yet begun. By September 2007, the Surge was in full swing, with US troops in Iraq numbering at 168,000 with a planned draw-down set to start the following November (set to conclude in July 2008). On September 11. 2007, Gen. David Petraeus testified before Congress that the Surge has thus far been successful, and news from Iraq in the following weeks and months verified Petraeus' statement. Even persistent Iraq War critic Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) admitted in November 2007 that the Surge was working, though he later backtracked.

So just how successful has the Surge been? Let's first take a look at this chart of the latest accounting of Iraqi civilian casualties (charts by Back Talk, statistics by Iraq Coalition Casualty Count):


And here are the US military military casualties (due to hostile fire):



By both of those measures, the Surge has been successful. Furthermore, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the organization largely responsible for the sectarian violence that has plagued that country since 2003, is now the weakest it has been in five years. Another major sore point in Iraq, Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi militias in Basra and Baghdad's Sadr City, have all but collapsed under pressure from the revivified Iraqi Army. And just two days ago, reports from Mosul indicate that AQI is on the defensive there as well.

How about other matters, such as Iraqi oil production and infrastructure? Improvements have been slow, but they are happening. During the first four months of 2008, Iraq's oil sales matched the total oil sales of the first six months of 2007. Also, according to the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index, electricity availability is holding steady and telephone service has undergone a dramatic increase. Given the poor state of Iraqi infrastructure, the damage and/or neglect of which began during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and worsened during the First Gulf War and the years that followed, a "quick fix" is simply not a realistic expectation.

In light of the positive news coming out of Iraq during the past year, why has much of of the mainstream media refrained from aggressively covering it? New York Post columnist Ralph Peters has an explanation:

Want a real "inconvenient truth?" Progress in Iraq is powerful and accelerating. But that fact isn't helpful to elite media commissars and cadres determined to decide the presidential race over our heads. How dare our troops win? Even worse, Iraqi troops are winning. Daily.

But Peters concedes:

To be fair to the quit-Iraq-and-save-the-terrorists media, they have covered a few recent stories from Iraq:

* When a rogue US soldier used a Koran for target practice, journalists pulled out all the stops to turn it into "Abu Ghraib, The Sequel." Unforgivably, the Army handled the situation well. The "atrocity" didn't get the traction the whorespondents hoped for.

* When a battered, bleeding al-Qaeda managed to set off a few bombs targeting Sunni Arabs who'd turned against terror, that, too, received delighted media play.

* As long as Baghdad-based journalists could hope that the joint US-Iraqi move into Sadr City would end disastrously, we were treated to a brief flurry of headlines.

* A few weeks back, we heard about another Iraqi company - 100 or so men - who declined to fight. The story was just delicious, as far as the media were concerned.

Then tragedy struck: As in Basra the month before, absent-without-leave (and hiding in Iran) Moqtada al-Sadr quit under pressure from Iraqi and US troops. The missile and mortar attacks on the Green Zone stopped. There's peace in the streets.

Above all, the United States military is doing a fine job in Iraq. Five years ago, they liberated Iraqis from the brutal clutches of Saddam Hussein. Since then, the processes of reconstruction and democratization have slowly but surely started to bear fruit for the long-suffering Iraqis. This is something for which President Bush, General Petraeus, the men and women of the armed services, and all Americans should be proud.