In July of this year, Baghdad was in crisis. Death squads roamed the streets abducting at will and killing more than 50 civilians per day. Starting on August 7, Operation Together Forward concentrated 8,000 additional U.S. troops on 5 of the most deadly neighborhoods in Baghdad - Doura, Ghazaliyah, Rashid, Ahmariya and Mansour (see map).

At the beginning of the operation, Senator John McCain grilled U.S. General John Abizaid about troop movements in Iraq, especially the redeployment of 3,500 troops from Mosul to Baghdad. He was concerned that we were simply putting out bigger and bigger fires, responding to flare ups rather than developing a strategy, saying:

“What I’d worry about is we’re playing a game of whack-a-mole here.”

Yesterday the L.A. Times offered a preliminary assessment of Operation Together Forward:

“An ambitious military sweep appears to be dramatically reducing Baghdad’s homicide rate, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Sunday. …

Similar sweeps in Baghdad and elsewhere since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 have reduced violence. But the bloodshed would increase when U.S. forces moved on. …

U.S. and Iraqi officials describe the Baghdad security plan as a last-ditch effort to stave off civil war and to shore up Maliki’s government, which has struggled to contain sectarian violence and deliver essentials such as electricity and gasoline.”

Twenty-two days after the operation began, it does seem that violence in Baghdad has been significantly reduced. Calculated on a monthly basis, there has been a 77% decrease in the number of civilian deaths.

Senator McCain has repeatedly called for more troops in Iraq to snuff out the sectarian violence once and for all. Is he right? By increasing the total number of U.S. soldiers in the Baghdad area from by 24,000 to 32,000, the troops are also becoming more efficient at preventing civilian deaths. In July, there were 76 civilian deaths for every 1,000 U.S. troops in Baghdad. During Operation Together Forward, that has dropped to 10 civilian deaths for every 1,000 troops in Baghdad.

But McCain’s comparison to Whac-A-Mole indicates that he believes troops movements within Iraq are a zero-sum game. As we move troops from hot spot to hot spot we are always chasing new problems. Perhaps. After the 3,500 troops in Mosul were moved to Baghdad, violence in Mosul did not increase significantly. Those 3,500 troops from the Stryker Brigade may have helped save as many as 622 Iraqi lives.

What’s more, U.S. troops in Baghdad appear to have a lower casualty rate in August than in July. Perhaps this is all due to the fact that militias such as those loyal to al-Sadr simply abandon neighborhoods where the U.S. coalition announces that it will be conducting raids. During Operation Together Freedom violence has surged in Diwaniya, for example.
But we have been down this road before. Here’s a description from the June, 2006 Christian Science Monitor of how the wealthy Amariya neighborhood first turned deadly:

“…insurgents began arriving in Amariyah after the deadly US assault on Fallujah in April 2004. The first jihadis sought haven with relatives, many of them former senior officers in Saddam Hussein’s Army. …

Not content with having found a haven, the militants set about transforming the demographics and social mores of the area. ‘At first it was just the outsiders, but some of the young men - surrounded by these people telling stories about what the Americans did in Fallujah and these preachers telling them it was their duty to fight - joined up,’ says Aqeel, a former resident of Amariyah who fled in February.

Soon, graffiti praising Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and promising death to traitors proliferated; new prayer leaders took over mosques, issuing strident demands for jihad over their loudspeakers every Friday; leaflets were distributed warning women not to work and to cover their hair, men not to trim their beards or wear shorts; then bodies started to appear on street corners.

Amariyah, a wealthy Baghdad … neighborhood of shaded gardens … has become synonymous with gruesome, anonymous death, as have other Sunni neighborhoods like Dora and Adhamiya. They are all examples of the ongoing battle occurring throughout Iraq to loosen the grip of the insurgency - and the tough fight facing the Iraqi Army and US forces to dislodge them.“

In June, Colonel Burleson said that he believed the violence in Amariya was “past its crest.” In June, Iraqi soldiers were more measured in their assessment of Amariya, saying that, “We’ve shut off most of the branch streets and are funneling the traffic through our checkpoints, so we’ve got a lot more control, but if we don’t maintain this type of control, what happens then?” The answer came in July.

Perhaps the administration should listen to those on the ground. A few days ago, a minibus driver who lives in one of the neighborhoods being targeted by Operation Forward Together said:

“As long as the Americans are here it is fine,” he said. “If they leave it to the Iraqi police the killing will just return.”

So Operation Whac-A-Mole is in place, and the results are dramatic… for now.

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