October 1, 2007

Gratefully Not Dead: Iraq Civilian and US Military Deaths Plummet

Fair warning: I am not a military strategist, nor do I play one on the internet. But I am an interested layman, and I've read as much as I can understand about counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy without returning to university.

From what I gather, one of the predictions of classical COIN is that, as the country fighting the insurgents shifts to a more effective COIN strategy, the indicator of success will be a significant drop in both civilian and military casualties, including deaths. (From now on, I will only discuss deaths, because it's hard to get data on non-fatal casualties.)

Insurgents practice asymmetrical warfare: They do not target the armed forces of the country the way an army would, force on force (milspeak for army vs. army in the open battlefield); and they don't precisely seize territory... thus eliminating two methods of evaluating military success in other types of wars.

In fact, the Islamist insurgents don't even seem to set up shadow governments (other than vague "caliphates," which are simply dictatorships by the biggest thug), nor do they attempt to win the "hearts and minds" of the civilians, as e.g. Communist insurgents tried in Vietnam, Korea, the Maylay states, and so forth. Rather, Islamist insurgents rampage through a town, killing civilians in essentially random ways, until they're driven out by COIN forces (as in Fallujah I and II in the pre-COIN period of the Iraq war).

Insurgents mostly target civilians; and even when they do attack the COIN army, they prefer to do so by ambushing patrollers, rather than trying to duke it out with an attacking force (the Taliban's catastrophic record against NATO shows why). In order to survive, an insurgency needs a constant stream of "victories," however small, to convince both the civilians who provide the sea of support for them and even for the insurgency's own members that the insurgency is the "strong horse," and everyone better get aboard. Each mass killing is considered a victory.

If instead they suffer a string of obvious defeats, then they start looking like losers: They lose support not only directly (members killed and captured) but also indirectly through a loss of prestige or "face." Fewer dead civilians and "infidel" soldiers (including IDF) directly translates into a loss of power and hegemony ("perceived fitness to rule," as I define it based on Gramsci). Therefore, the proper measure of COIN success is significantly fewer civilian and Coalition deaths.

When the country fighting the insurgency becomes more effective and begins denying the insurgency a sufficient stream of victories -- substituting instead a steady drip, drip, drip of insurgent defeats in the form of killings and captures and interdiction of attacks -- then two things happen:

• Some civilian supporters of the insurgency rethink their loyalty, start withdrawing support, and begin instead cooperating with the defending country;
• The insurgents themselves drift away from their former organizations (from fear and boredom), fading back into the general population... or if that is impossible, crossing the border into some adjoining country (as, e.g., Muqtada Sadr has returned to Iran).

So -- you're way ahead of me -- it's no surprise that a drop in civilian and military casualties is precisely what we've seen in Iraq since the COIN strategy was actually implemented in June: An initial spike of military casualties during the pre-implementation phase of preparing the battlefield, followed by the civilian and military death rate plummeting:

• According to Iraq Coalition Casualties (iCasualties), civilian deaths in September were 746, the lowest since February 2006, when it was 688; civilian deaths have dropped by nearly 75% from the local high in February.
• AP reports that civilian deaths in Iraq dropped by 50% in September alone;
• According to Breitbart, September saw only 70 U.S. military fatalities in Iraq (iCasualties reports only 66, plus 3 non-US Coalition deaths)... the lowest total since July 2006.

Here is a table compiled from the iCasualties 2007 figures; ISF means Iraqi Security Forces, including the Iraqi Army, National Police, and local police:

Here are the data for civilian and total killings in line-chart form. Note that for the chart, we have removed the anomalous Yazidi bombing of August 14th. The reason we chose to do this can be found in a previous post, Civilian Deaths in Iraq Are Up, But They're Really Down:

The trendline is clear, even brutally clear: The COIN strategy is working exactly as planned. Barring any significant changes, the Iraq war is, for all military intents and beyond all argument, over; and it has ended in victory for the United States and for a free and democratic Iraq.

What remains is mopping up... which will surely be deadly and surely result in the killings of many innocent civilians and of many American, Coalition, and Iraqi security forces. But the mop-up will not change the final result; the insurgency has been broken.

As al-Qaeda is driven out of Iraq, the ruling Shia see less and less reason to support or tolerate the "death squads," which also kill Shia who don't conform to the militias' crabbed vision of Islam. More Shia will join "Mosul awakening" or "Basra awakening" type organizations and begin informing on militias and their murderous activities.

The major Shiite parties, DAWA and SCIRI, will find it much easier to cut the militias off at the knees than continue funding them and then apologizing for their activities; to the extent the militias will continue to exist at all, they will likely transition to launching occasional attacks on rival Shiite parties in advance of elections, as is the Arabic way of democracy: The days of a hundred throat-slittings a day of randomly selected Sunni Iraqis are gone, and they're not likely ever to return... they were situational, caused by Shiite overreaction to al-Qaeda depredations.

The question now changes to the larger geopolitical conundrum: How to use Iraq as a model for transforming the Middle East and the larger Non-Integrating Gap. In the future, no matter who is president, we shall require Gap countries to become more or less democratic states that are basically secure and basically free; and we shall require them to enter the global grid of communications, capitalism, and political moderation.

As Iraq cools down, its very existence should make it much easier to deal with problems like Iran, Syria, and even countries in other regions, such as North Korea and Venezuela. Too, the final success of the Bush policy will induce other Western nations -- those bold, independent trendsetters -- to jump on the bandwagon. ("Oceania has always supported pre-emptive strikes, covert action, and counterinsurgency!")

All I can say is thank you, Mr. President, for quite literally sticking to your guns. You will be remembered... but not the way Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 90%) fantasizes!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 1, 2007, at the time of 7:18 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this hissing: http://biglizards.net/mt3.36/earendiltrack.cgi/2472

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Gratefully Not Dead: Iraq Civilian and US Military Deaths Plummet:

» Somewhere in Time from Confederate Yankee
It becomes more apparent every day that the reactionary progressive Democrats that pinned their hopes of a future ascendancy upon a defeat in Iraq are psychologically unable to come do grips with the reality on the ground in that nation.... [Read More]

Tracked on October 3, 2007 12:18 PM

» Watcher's Council results from The Colossus of Rhodey
And now...  the winning entries in the Watcher's Council vote for this week are Gratefully Not Dead: Iraq Civilian and US Military Deaths Plummet by Big Lizards, and That's Propa-tainment! by Pajamas Media. There was actually a tie in the... [Read More]

Tracked on October 6, 2007 4:54 AM

» The Coalition of the Willing from Watcher of Weasels
As you may or may not already be aware, members of the Watcher's Council hold a vote every week on what we consider to be the most link-worthy pieces of writing around...  though I don't actually vote unless there happens... [Read More]

Tracked on October 7, 2007 6:42 PM

» Wotcher Know? from Big Lizards
Yawn. So Big Gizzards racks up another win on the Watcher's Council. Big deal; I'm sure we'll win nearly every vote from here on out. The competition fades away, and there is left only us, standing unbowed and invincible. You... [Read More]

Tracked on October 9, 2007 3:15 PM

Comments

The following hissed in response by: ira

The above hissed in response by: ira at October 1, 2007 7:55 PM

The following hissed in response by: Greg Marquez

The above hissed in response by: Greg Marquez at October 1, 2007 9:18 PM

The following hissed in response by: Terrye

The above hissed in response by: Terrye at October 2, 2007 3:47 AM

The following hissed in response by: howardhughes

The above hissed in response by: howardhughes at October 2, 2007 4:40 AM

The following hissed in response by: David M

The above hissed in response by: David M at October 2, 2007 10:35 AM

The following hissed in response by: MTF

The above hissed in response by: MTF at October 2, 2007 1:16 PM

The following hissed in response by: leftnomore

The above hissed in response by: leftnomore at October 2, 2007 2:18 PM

The following hissed in response by: Bookworm

The above hissed in response by: Bookworm at October 2, 2007 2:19 PM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh at October 2, 2007 2:31 PM

The following hissed in response by: exDemo

The above hissed in response by: exDemo at October 2, 2007 3:50 PM

The following hissed in response by: judson

The above hissed in response by: judson at October 3, 2007 12:30 PM

Post a comment

© 2005-2009 by Dafydd ab Hugh - All Rights Reserved