The sharp reduction of U.S. fatalities in Iraq is obviously encouraging, but it’s also surprising. The administration has sent more troops into combat, which suggests the death rate would go up, not down.
But the numbers have dropped steadily over the last few months, to the point that 29 servicemen and women have died in Iraq this month so far, on pace for the best month since March 2006. To be sure, there have been peaks and valleys for nearly five years, and previous reductions have been followed by steep increases, but for now, fewer Americans are dying in Iraq. Considering how deadly 2007 has been, it’s heartening to see the decline.
Slate’s Fred Kaplan argues that has less to do with the conditions of the war and more to do with the way we’re fighting it. His focus, specifically, is on the use of airstrikes.
[S]ince the surge began and Gen. Petraeus shifted the strategy to counterinsurgency, the number of U.S. airstrikes has soared.
From January to September of this year, according to unclassified data, U.S. Air Force pilots in Iraq have flown 996 sorties that involved dropping munitions. By comparison, in all of 2006, they flew just 229 such sorties — one-quarter as many. In 2005, they flew 404; in 2004, they flew 285.
In other words, in the first nine months of 2007, Air Force planes dropped munitions on targets in Iraq more often than in the previous three years combined.
More telling still, the number of airstrikes soared most dramatically at about the same time that U.S. troop fatalities declined.
It’s tempting to think this approach is the answer we’ve been looking for. We bomb the bad guys from the air, the bad guys die, and the U.S. troops come home safely. Piece of cake.
Except, it doesn’t quite work that way. In an urban environment, dropping a bomb from the air inevitably leads to civilians — innocent bystanders — dying, too. As Kaplan noted, “This makes some of the bystanders’ relatives yearn for vengeance. And it makes many Iraqis — relatives, neighbors, and others watching the news of the attack on television — less trusting of the American troops who are supposedly protecting them.”
In a conventional war, these consequences might be deemed unavoidable side-effects. But in a counterinsurgency campaign, where the point is to sway the hearts and minds of the population, wreaking such damage is self-defeating.
The U.S. Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency, which Gen. Petraeus supervised shortly before he returned to Iraq, makes the point explicitly: “An air strike can cause collateral damage that turns people against the host-nation government and provides insurgents with a major propaganda victory. Even when justified under the law of war, bombings that result in civilian casualties can bring media coverage that works to the insurgents’ benefits. … For these reasons, commanders should consider the use of air strikes carefully during [counterinsurgency] operations, neither disregarding them outright nor employing them excessively.”
Kaplan concluded, “The old adage about warfare — that it’s easy to kill people, hard to kill a particular person — is doubly true of aerial warfare. And in counterinsurgency warfare, the consequences are counterproductive.”
In other words, it’s certainly good news that U.S. fatalities are dropping, but if the trend is a result of a policy that will simply prolong the war, we’re not getting any closer to our goal.