Benchmarking Iraq for Disaster

President Bush has called upon Congress, the American public, the Iraqi people, and the world to suspend judgment -- until at least September -- on the success of his escalation of the war, euphemistically designated a "surge." But the fact is: It has already failed and it's obvious enough why.

Much attention has been paid to the recent White House report that recorded "satisfactory performance" on eight Congressional benchmarks and "unsatisfactory performance" on six others (with an additional four receiving mixed evaluations). Fred Kaplan of Slate and Patrick Cockburn of the Independent, among others, have demonstrated the fraudulence of this assessment. Cockburn summarized his savaging of the document thusly: "In reality, the six failures are on issues critical to the survival of Iraq while the eight successes are on largely trivial matters."

As it happens, though, these benchmarks are almost completely beside the point. They don't represent the key goals of the surge at all, which were laid out clearly by the President in his January speech announcing the operation:

"Our troops will have a well-defined mission: to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs."

The success of such "benchmarks" can be judged relatively easily. As President Bush himself put the matter: "We can expect to see Iraqi troops chasing down murderers, fewer brazen acts of terror, and growing trust and cooperation from Baghdad's residents."

This was supposed to be accomplished through two major initiatives. Most visibly, the U.S. military was to adopt a more aggressive strategy for pacifying Baghdad neighborhoods considered strongholds for the Sunni insurgency. Occupation officials blame them for the bulk of the vehicle bombs and other suicide attacks that have devastated mainly Shiite neighborhoods. The second, less visible (but no less important) initiative involved subduing the Mahdi army of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr -- the largest and most ferocious of the Shia militias -- which occupation officials blame for the bulk of death-squad murders in and around the capital.

These changes should have been observable as early as this July. By then, as a "senior American military officer" told the New York Times, it would already be time to refocus attention on "restoring services and rebuilding the neighborhoods.""

To judge the surge right now -- by the President's real "benchmarks" -- we need only look for a dramatic drop in vehicle and other "multiple fatality bombings" in populated areas, and for a dramatic drop in the number of tortured and executed bodies found each morning in various dumping spots around Baghdad.

By these measures, the surge has already been a miserable failure, something that began to be documented as early as April when Nancy Youssef of the McClatchy newspapers reported that there had been no decline in suicide-bombing deaths; and that, after an initial decline in the bodies discarded by death-squads around the capital, the numbers were rising again. (These trends have been substantiated by the Brookings Institution, which has long collected the latest statistics from Iraq.)

A more vivid way to appreciate the nature of the almost instantaneous failure of the overall surge operation is anecdotally by reading news reports of specific campaigns -- like the report Julian Barnes and Ned Parker of the Los Angeles Times sent in from Baghdad's Sunni-majority Ubaidi neighborhood, which was headlined: "U.S. troop buildup in Iraq falling short"). It concluded ominously, "U.S. forces so far have been unable to establish security, even for themselves."

Or we might note that, instead of ebbing, violence in Iraq was flooding into new areas, just beyond the reach of the U.S. combat brigades engaged in the surge. Or perhaps it's worth pointing out that, by July, the highly fortified "Green Zone" in the very heart of Baghdad -- designed as the invulnerable safe haven for American and Iraqi officials -- had become a regular target for increasingly destructive mortar and rocket attacks launched from unpacified neighborhoods elsewhere in the capital. According to New York Times reporters Alissa J. Rubin and Stephen Farrell, the Zone has been "attacked almost daily for weeks."