JETTISONING FAILED STRATEGY

Even if attacks killing nine Americans in Iraq hadn’t occurred just days after Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, declared “great successes” against insurgents, plenty of other information would have disputed the idea. As Nathaniel Fick, a former Marine captain who led infantry platoons in Afghanistan and Iraq, retorted, “the three enablers of the insurgency – weapons, men and money” continue to flow into Iraq, while Americans are distracted by “the misleading statistic of dead insurgents, as if the enemy were finite.”

The nine killed over two days – soldiers and security officers, including a State Department official – were caught not in a brief spike of violence but a sustained and sustainable increase in attacks over months. Looking back over the last couple of years in Iraq, the chaos of 2003 now looks safer for civilians and soldiers than post-election 2005. The Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon has done an important service keeping track of scores of statistics under the title “Iraq Index,” and these show the number of insurgents in Iraq virtually undiminished since last year and considerably higher than in 2003.

Similarly, the number of daily attacks by insurgents rose from 56 last summer to 70 this year. There is no evidence that this is the “last throes” of anything, as Vice President Cheney once burbled. Nor have the number of foreign fighters diminished, nor are coalition forces gaining ground on finding and disarming the most deadly weapon against it, improvised explosive devices.

There is good news, certainly, in the steady rebuilding of Iraq – there are now more schools and telephones and courts than previously, but the chief complaint among civilians, according to polls, is a lack of electric-ity, and production is down considerably there since last year.

These sorts of gains and losses, with, always, more loss of life and a huge drain on the U.S. Treasury, could continue for a long time even as security becomes more tenuous. Simply pulling out risks a breakdown of the scale seen in Rwanda. University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole proposes the orderly removal of ground troops while maintaining air power to prevent civil war; others suggest historian Andrew Krepinevich’s “oil spot” theory, in which small areas are made demonstrably safe with all the benefits that come with safety and then their edges are spread to, eventually, connect.

But it is Capt. Fick, whose comments appeared recently in The New York Times, who begins with the most important change: “President Bush would have to condone a major philosophical and strategic shift away from what hasn’t worked.” The nation needs that shift, certainly Iraq needs it. Congress should demand it.

The evidence of a failed strategy is as apparent as floodwaters overwhelming the levees of New Orleans. The longer the president waits, the fewer the options that will be left to him.