The Only Thing Surging in Iraq is the Number of Americans Dying

Technorati Tags: terrorism, terrorists, war on terror

Fourteen more U.S. soldiers have been killed over the last three days.

The WaPo has a piece today on the sharp increase in U.S. troop deaths since the surge began -- and the increase is getting steeper:

As U.S. troops push more deeply into Baghdad and its volatile outskirts, Iraqi insurgents are using increasingly sophisticated and lethal means of attack, including bigger roadside bombs that are resulting in greater numbers of American fatalities relative to the number of wounded.

Insurgents are deploying huge, deeply buried munitions set up to protect their territory and mounting complex ambushes that demonstrate their ability to respond rapidly to U.S. tactics. A new counterinsurgency strategy has resulted in decreased civilian deaths in Baghdad but has placed thousands of additional American troops at greater risk in small outposts in the capital and other parts of the country.

"It is very clear that the number of attacks against U.S. forces is up" and that they have grown more effective in Baghdad, especially in recent weeks, said Maj. Gen. James E. Simmons, deputy commander for operations in Iraq. At the same time, he said, attacks on Iraqi security forces have declined slightly, citing figures that compare the period of mid-February to mid-May to the preceding three months. "The attacks are being directed at us and not against other people," he said.
[...]
Insurgents are also staging carefully planned, complex ambushes and retaliatory attacks as they target U.S. troops, the officials said. While few in number, these include direct assaults on U.S. military outposts, ambushes in which American troops have been captured, and complex attacks that use multiple weapons to strike more than one U.S. target. For example, attackers will bomb a patrol and then target ground forces or aircraft that come to its aid.

"We are starting to see more sophistication and training in their attacks," said a senior military official in Baghdad. While the vast majority of attacks are still relatively simple and involve a single type of weapon, "clearly the trend is going in the wrong direction," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.

And still, the policy wonks continue to miss the point:

U.S. patrols and raids have also uncovered nearly 2,500 weapons caches and killed or captured more than 20,000 insurgents, militia members and other fighters nationwide since January. Among the enemy killed or captured are more than 1,700 individual targets considered "high value," in what military officials and analysts say is an effort to eliminate leaders of enemy cells in hopes they cannot quickly be replaced.

"Maybe this is the bloody period when we are doing the heavy fighting to get at the bad actors so we can have a more peaceful future," said Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

How many times must it be said? There is no finite number of "bad actors"; and terrorist groups do not wait until the leader of an "enemy cell" is killed to scramble for a replacement: they plan ahead -- unlike the Bush administration.