Iraq War: Remember, now, we're winning, we've been winning for a long time

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

How does the insurgency look right now? I'm sure Bush will tell us on Tuesday about our constant victory over it. Here's part of what Anthony Cordesman has to say in Iraq's Evolving Insurgency (*.pdf file). Although the cover page indicates that this report was last updated on 05/19/05, the text appears to have been updated sometime in June.

US and Iraqi government attempts to root out the insurgency have so far only had limited impact. While some US officers have talked about the battle of Fallujah in November 2004 as a tipping point, many US experts were cautious even at the time. They felt the insurgents did lose a key sanctuary, suffered more than 1,000 killed, and lost significant numbers of prisoners and detainees. They also lost some significant leaders and cadres. Many insurgents and insurgent leaders seem to have left Fallujah before the fighting, however, and many others escaped.

The battles that have followed have been less concentrated and less intensive, but almost continuous – mixed with raids, captures, and the sudden "swarming" of known and suspected insurgent headquarters and operational areas. While neither MNC-I or the Iraqi government have provided counts of Insurgent killed and wounded, the figures almost certainly exceed 10,000 between May 2003 and May 2005, and could be substantially higher.

In spite of major new offensives like Operation Matador, however, Sunni insurgent groups remain active in Sunni-populated areas like the "Sunni Triangle," the Al Anbar Province to the west of Baghdad, and the so-called "Triangle of Death" to the southeast of Baghdad. As a result,four of Iraq’s provinces continue to have both a major insurgency threat and a major insurgent presence. Sunni insurgents have also repeatedly shown since the battle of Fallujah that they can strike in ethnically mixed and Shi’itedominated cities like Baghdad, Mosul and Basra. They have also operated in Kurdish areas. (p. 34)

The uncertainties about the number of insurgents is also worth keeping in mind:

US officials kept repeating estimates of total insurgent strengths of 5,000 from roughly the fall of 2003 through the summer of 2004. In October, they issued a range of 12,000 to 16,000 but have never defined how many are hard-core and full time, and how many are part time. According to one outside expert, estimates as divergent as 3,500 to 200,000 were being cited in March. 2000.

US and Iraqi official experts would be the first to indicate that any such numbers had to be guesstimates. They have also been consistently careful to note that they are uncertain as to whether the numbers are increasing or decreasing with time as a result of US and Iraqi operations versus increases in the political and other tensions that lead Iraqi Arab Sunnis to join the insurgents. There is no evidence that the number of insurgents is declining as a result of Coalition and Iraqi attacks to date. US experts stated in the spring of 2005 that they had no evidence of a decline in insurgent numbers in spite of large numbers of kills and captures since the summer of 2004. (pp. 37-39)