Patrick Ruffini, writing for Townhall, suggests that Shhhh… The Surge is Working:

Early indications are that the troop surge into Baghdad is working. It hasn’t been reported on widely, but murders in Baghdad are down 70%, attacks are down 80%, Mahdi Army chief Moqtada al-Sadr has reportedly made off for Iran, and many Baghdadis who had fled the violence now feel it’s safe enough to return. The strategy that Congress is busy denouncing is proving to be our best hope for victory.

That type of claim needs a link towards the source, yet unfortunately there isn’t one. However, beyond issues of citation, the bottom line is that a) the surge has not hit full strength, and b) it is unclear as to what periods of time Ruffini is comparing here.

It is simply too early to know what has happened or why, let alone to start proclaiming success.  One would think that boosters of the administration would learn to keep their powder dry until definitive evidence emerges one way or another.

Ruffini continues:

Even some discordant voices in the media are starting to wonder what’s happening. Time magazine worries that it’s “Quiet in Baghdad. Too quiet.” That’s right — a dramatic reduction in violence is actually bad news.

The problem with this statement is that is is misleading as to what the point of the Time piece is.  If one reads it, one would note that the concern is not over the lack of fighting, it is over where the fighters have gone and what they are up and what they might be planning.  It is no shock that the increased presence of US and Iraqi troops will quell violence in a given location–that’s a given.  However, for the “surge” to be a success, the violence will have to remain quelled once the troops withdraw.  As such, if the insurgents and terrorists simple wait out the surge, only to return once the troops are gone, then the notion that the policy actually accomplished anything other than an extended time out is flawed.

Indeed, a key critique about the surge is that it would create the illusion of the cessation of violence without actually solving any of the root problems.   As such, it has the potential to be nothing more than a political move that will allow the administration to show some “success” without actually having fixed anything.

Going back to the Time piece, the point of the title (the part about it being “too quiet”) is not some lament on the part of an anti-surge journalist, it is meant to reflect the idea of the calm before the storm.  To wit:

Meanwhile the militia and the insurgents have been finding ways to operate under the radar and out of firing range. On the streets of Ghazaliyah, Sgt. Michaud said, the Mahdi Army continued to “slowly, but surely,” force Sunnis from their homes through other forms of intimidation. The more immediate threat, though, may be a spectacular Sunni insurgent attack designed to show residents in Ghazaliyah that their power has not been blunted. “If I’m the enemy, I’ve lost the initiative,” Peterson said. “I’ve got to do something big and visual.”

There is a very real concern that the “big and visual” act is on the horizon–something that is normal in these types of insurgencies.

Update: Radley Balko shares my skepticism over the numbers that Ruffini cites above:

This is silly. Murders in Baghdad are “down 70 percent?” Since when? And compared to what? Since the two-week-old surge? How is that a remotely reliable statistic?

Not very, I should expect.

Balko goes on to detail a number of attacks in the last 24 hours or so.

tag: Surge, Iraq