Last night Bush faced the nation, tail between legs, and announced in sober terms a plan to increase the number of troops in Baghdad and Anbar Province by 21,500 troops. This is not a novel approach. In August 2006, Operation Whac-a-Mole pulled troops from Mosul to secure violent areas of Baghdad. The results were dramatic… and temporary. As Senator McCain predicted then, once the troops moved on, the sectarian violence returned to the neighborhoods that U.S. troops had vacated.

Last night’s speech was Bush’s last stand. He seemed to finally realize that not only Iraq’s future is at stake, but also his historical legacy. He faced two basic policy decisions with four possible outcomes.

Using a good old game theory matrix, we see that although there is a chance that a Democrat-led withdrawal might succeed, it would not provide a political victory for Bush. The troop surge is the only attractive solution to a president with an eye on his place in history.

Policy A: Democrats secure a phased withdrawal from Iraq

Outcome 1): Iraq stabilizes or even flourishes as a beacon of democracy and freedom across the Middle East. Bush might get credit for his long term military strategy, but will more likely be blamed for a myopic insistence on prolonged occupation that would have ignited a civil war were it not for the Democrats in Congress.

Outcome 2): Iraq devolves into bloody civil war. Bush is blamed for starting an unnecessary war that could ignite sectarian strife across the Middle East. American military looks weak.

Policy B: Troop surge into Baghdad and Anbar

Outcome 1): Troops secure Baghdad and Iraq before Americans become impatient. Iraq becomes a model of democracy in the Middle East. Bush’s reputation is salvaged, but historians note that his “stay the course” tactics changed only after the 2006 elections.

Outcome 2): Additional American troops cannot break cycle of violence. Iraq devolves to civil war and American military looks even weaker and more irrelevant than if we had withdrawn before the civil war. Bush is blamed for strategic and tactical blunders that endure for generations.

No Free Refills

Three weeks ago President Bush announced plans to increase permanent active-duty military by as many as 70,000 troops. Those troops won’t recruited and trained until 2008, but Bush has already committed one-third (21,500) of them to the troop surge proposed last night. Those 70,000 troops will also be replacing the 25,851 dead and wounded during the war thus far.

The grisly truth is that 68% of the new troops that will be ready in 2008 have already been used.

Last night Bush struck a note of atonement, stating that, “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.” Let’s hope that the latest surge protectors are not being sent to Iraq to protect Bush’s historical legacy. We cannot afford for Bush to be responsible yet again.

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*Maximum proposed troop increase

Sources: Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, Washington Post

One week ago Ethiopian troops moved into the Somali capital of Mogadishu to quell the unrest. According to a U.S. State Department spokesman, the Ethiopian military did so at the request of the secular Somali government which has been battling Islamic fundamentalists in Mogadishu.

The invasion bears some striking similarities to the U.S. invasion of Iraq - perhaps even more so to the Muslim world. Ethiopia is a U.S. ally and a largely Christian nation with a history of enmity toward Muslim Somalia. Ethiopia seemed poised for a rapid military victory, yet completely unprepared for maintaining security in Mogadishu.

As we saw in Iraq, a power vacuum is fertile ground for extremists. Somalia’s secular interior minister ominously said, “We have a symbolic government. Ministries we don’t have, a military we don’t have.” Recent statements by Al Qaida spokesman Ayman al-Zawahri identify that Somalia and Iraq as prime Islamic battlegrounds in their war on the West.

The security picture in Mogadishu bears striking resemblance to that in Baghdad:

Six days after the transitional government took hold, very little security was evident beyond that which Somalis have grown accustomed to providing for themselves: roving pickup trucks filled with armed teenagers, and AK-47-toting militiamen who guard the city block by block, and clan by clan.

Despite similar conditions on the ground, there are important differences. For one, Al Qaeda was active in Somalia before the Ethiopian invasion. And unlike the United States, Ethiopia is appealing to the international community for assistance. With any luck the outcome in Somalia three years hence will also be starkly different from that in Iraq today.

Source: Wikipedia, statastic research

It looks like a duck, it walks like a duck, and it really sounds like a duck.

Yesterday’s Washington Post editorial, “What Next?” gave a grim assessment of how a civil war in Iraq could explode into a regional conflict in the Middle East. Iraq has all of the necessary ingredients of a civil war: a growing tendency to identify with religious and ethnic groups rather than the Iraqi nation-state, valuable resources spread unevenly throughout the country, a growing perception that democracy does not reflect regional interests, and daily news of increasing civilian casualties.

A broader civil war would likely produce Iraqi refugees who could export the Iraqi conflict to neighboring countries. As we have seen in the recent Lebanon-Israel conflict, these neighboring states are willing to fund proxies such as Hezbollah, if not to intervene directly. The authors note that the foundation for a regional war could already be in place:

U.S. military and Iraqi sources think there are several thousand Iranian agents of all kinds already in Iraq…. Iran has set up an extensive network of safe houses, arms caches, communications channels and proxy fighters, and will be well-positioned to pursue its interests in a full-blown civil war.

Although Bush administration officials acknowledge privately that things are not going according to plan, Bush said publicly today that Americans “have to understand the consequences of leaving Iraq before the job is done.”

We’ve done a heck of a job so far. Insecurity has left the Iraqi economy in shambles making it easier for insurgents to find new recruits. One-fifth of the population is in poverty. Oil production is still 11% below pre-war production levels. Unemployment is as high as 40% in some regions, and inflation is rampant.

Iraq also has a serious brain drain that leaves little human capital with which to rebuild. According to a report by the Brookings Institution, 2,000 doctors have been murdered, and another 12,000 have fled the country. Internal displacement is also a growing problem: 200,000 Sunni Arabs have been displaced from western Iraq and up to 100,000 Shiites have fled cities to take refuge in the south.

Civilian deaths increased by nine percent from June to July, and have almost doubled since January, 2006. One of the more disturbing trends is that as violence has increased in Iraq, it has also become increasingly brutal.

When do we recognize this as a civil war? In the editorial “What Next?” Laura Stanton of the Washington Post produced a graphic that applied the percentage of deaths and displaced persons from recent civil wars to the current population of Iraq. Statastic used this data to gain further insight into the average number of deaths per month during these civil wars.

So how severe are the 3,438 civilian deaths reported in July, 2006? On a per capita basis, this is nearly 50% more deaths per month than averaged during the Croatian civil war. If violence in Iraq were to increase at the same rate that it increased between January and July of 2006, there would be more than 450 deaths per day in Iraq by July, 2007. This is about the same rate as the Kosovo war, but with one critical difference: Iraq’s population is 14 times larger. We would need as much as four times the current financial and military resources to quell a civil war, requiring as many as 450,000 soldiers. And that says nothing of how we would stop a regional conflict.

If a civil war does erupt into a regional war, Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack note that history is not on our side:

No country in recent history has successfully managed the spillovers from a full-blown civil war; in fact, most attempts have failed miserably.

Much as Americans may want to believe that the United States can just walk away from Iraq should it slide into all-out civil war, the threat of spillover from such a conflict throughout the Middle East means it can’t.

It’s time to acknowledge the Iraqi insurgency for what it is: a civil war. Quack.

Sources: Washington Post (primary sources cited include Amnesty International, Center for Study of Civil War, CIA World Factbook, Richard Holbrooke’s “To End a War”, World Bank); PBS Frontline map.

Notes: *The estimate for July, 2007 applies the rate of doubling in civilian deaths that occurred during the 6 months between January and July, 2006.

The average monthly deaths were calculated by applying the death rate per capita in each country’s civil war to the population of Iraq. This was then divided by the length of the each civil war. The monthly average was calculated using whole years for these conflicts. In other words if a civil was started in December of 2000 and ended in January 2001, its duration would counted as two years, not two months.

Why the lack of precision? Because using the monthly average of deaths during a civil war is an imperfect measure to begin with. Civil conflicts often hinge on a single event that may not have many civilian deaths (such as the February 22, 2006 bombing of a sacred Shiite shrine in Samarra), or a monthly average may understate the brutality of a shorter campaign (such as the 800,000 who were murdered in Rwanda over the course of 100 days).

This measure is only meant to lend an international comparison to the debate about what constitutes a civil war.