The decline signaled a U.S. success in bringing down violence in Baghdad and surrounding regions since Washington completed its infusion of 30,000 more troops on June 15.
A total of 64 American forces died in September — the lowest monthly toll since July 2006.
The decline in Iraqi civilian deaths was even more dramatic, falling from 1,975 in August to 922 last month, a decline of 53.3 percent. The breakdown in September was 844 civilians and 78 police and Iraqi soldiers, according to Iraq's ministries of Health, Interior and Defense.
Given that I was worried about just this metric, was I wrong to assume we couldn't reduce casualties with a surge?
No. Our surge would not have achieved these results on its own in the short run.
It simply isn't just more US troops and a better strategy that put our people in the field. It isn't a case that we could have succeeded in this manner years ago. We wouldn't have had the Iraqi forces at the skill level needed to operate with us.
And more important, we wouldn't have had an enemy population ready to work with us. The real metric enabling these trends is the rejection by more Sunni Arabs of the jihadis who wanted to bomb and terrorize their way to power over the Shia-dominated government. Anbar is only the most obvious case of this metric.
And this metric is why the al Qaeda enemy is reeling. We kill more enemies because the Sunni Arab population is finally rejecting terrorism--not the other way around.
Granted, some of this was chicken versus egg stuff, since we had to slow down Sadrist death squads killing Sunni Arabs enough for the Sunni Arabs to defect. And we had to hit the Sunni Arab terrorists hard enough to protect the Shias and so deny the Shia Sadrists the excuse to kill Sunni Arabs "in revenge." This is what I figured the major purpose of the surge was all along--protecting the Sunni Arabs so they'd feel safe enough to surrender. Hitting the Sunni Arab jihadis at the same was just as important to keep the surge from looking like an anti-Shia strategy as it was to deny the Sadrists an excuse to kill.
And once the Sunni Arabs defected in high enough numbers, the fight against Sunni al Qaeda in Iraq became much easier.
And this trend of draining the swamp is what seems to be making the declining civilian casualties a real result of victory rather than a momentary result of adding more troops who disrupt the enemy momentaritly. In the past, the clampdown was followed by the enemy reacting to and eventually getting around the effect of additional troops to restore the killing level.
I'm getting more comfortable that reduced civilian asualties are now a result of an accumulating victory rather than a temporary lull. The real metric of Sunni Arab surrender is what enabled this decline in casulaties.
But civilian casualties are just too convenient a metric for the media not to use.
UPDATE: I don't mean to suggest the surge has been irrelevant. The surge has exploited the ongoing success our operations have been achieving. Without the surge, the morre dramatic success we are seeing would have played out over a longer time, I think.
