All the Bad News on the Surge

To be honest, the surge is going better than I thought it would. I had thought that the surge would have led to a big blow-up among Shiites by now. But Baghdad hasn't exploded and both Americans and Shiites have acted cautiously to prevent a large scale confrontation. The leader of the Mahdi Army, Moqtada al-Sadr, cautiously decided that the beginning of the surge would be a good time to take a long vacation in Iran and ordered his militia underground. The American military matched Sadr's caution by limiting itself to a token show of force in the giant Shiite slum of Sadr city where the population is largely loyal to the Mahdi militia. As a result, the surge is not the disaster it could have been if both sides had been more aggressive.

But that doesn't mean the surge isn't failing.

According to the New York Times, American commanders thought they would have control over every Baghdad neighborhood by now. But they only have control over 1/3 and even that is uncertain.

The American military was counting on Iraqi Army and police forces to "hold" Baghdad neighborhoods after they had been cleared by Americans. But the Iraqi Army has disappointed again while the Iraqi police are still infiltrated by the Mahdi Army. There have even been a couple of incidents where Iraqi police have been involved in setting up roadside bombs to attack American soldiers.

The bottom line is that Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents are coming back into neighborhoods as the Americans move on to clearing new neighborhoods. Nothing has changed since 2004. The American military "clears" out neighborhoods, towns, and cities but there aren't enough American soldiers or reliable Iraqis to "hold" areas let alone engage in any economic reconstruction.

As a result, Baghdad is far from being "stabilized" in the way the Bush administration envisioned.

Actually, the New York Times is looking at things through the rose-colored glasses of the American military. Sunni insurgents are stronger than they were, they're launching more suicide bombings and attacks on American troops, and have made life more dangerous for the Shiites they're attacking. It looks like security forthe civilian population in Baghdad has deteriorated somewhat as a whole since the beginning of the surge.

American military officials don't think that Baghdad can be completely secured until September. Maybe they're right, but it sounds like they're being wildly over-optimistic again.