In the beginning of the year, American commanders held their fire, but then it was decided to keep going with the anti-terrorist operations, as it appeared that the Iraqis were deadlocked on forming a new government. So May will be a bloody month as well.
I had thought a big part of the five-month decline was passing responsibility for fighting over to the Iraqis as more Iraqis are trained. With Strategypage's information, this is clearly not the whole story.
As I've long noted, in the short run we can reduce casualties just by pulling back and avoiding fighting. But eventually casualties will rise even faster as the enemy enters the vaccum. So whenever we've had drops in casualties, in the back of my mind I worried that we were shrinking from fighting out of fear of casualties rather than being a positive trend.
I think the five-month drop was partly due to winning, but there is also a reduction of combat missions contributing to the drop, as it turns out. This does show the problem of just looking at body counts. Information on combat activity--patrols, convoys, offensives--would have shown a decrease in activity that could have clued us in to the reason for the decline of casualties. I don't blame the Pentagon for not sharing that information, but it does hamper assessment in the short run.
Also, my speculation that we were holding back in Baghdad to put pressure on the Iraqis to form a government may be correct. I don't think we avoided combat out of fear of casualties, so there has to be some explanation.
I cannot rule out the idea that we thought we were giving the Sunnis a chance to join the government and simply did not want to provide excuses to halt negotiations. If so, I think that was a mistake. This bears watching. Once the enemy gives up fighting, we can stop fighting. But our scale of fighting should never be the subject of negotiations before the enemy gives up.
For whatever reason, now that we have gone back on the offensive, our casualties are going up.
So the drop in casualties wasn't nearly as significant as I thought; but on the other hand the rise isn't as alarming, either.
