Baghdad and Other Iraqi Cities Calmer

Iraqis returned to the streets of Baghdad after a curfew was lifted, and the southern port city of Basra appeared quiet on Monday, a day after the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr called for his followers to stop fighting and in turn demanded concessions from Iraq’s government.

Heavy Terrorist Losses in Northern Iraq

Turkey said its ground forces had crossed the border [into Northern Iraq] to tackle [Kurdish] rebels late on Thursday after an air and artillery bombardment.

PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said the offensive is limited in scale and troops will return as soon as possible.

The UN secretary general and the US have urged Turkey to show restraint in the offensive [against the PKK.]

A Turkish army statement said: "It has been understood from preliminary information that the terrorists have suffered heavy losses under long-range weapons fire and air strikes."

Delay in MRAP Armored Vehicle Approvals Cost American Lives in Iraq War

Hundreds of U.S. Marines have been killed or injured by roadside bombs in Iraq because Marine Corps bureaucrats refused an urgent request in 2005 from battlefield commanders for blast-resistant vehicles, an internal military study concludes.

The study, written by a civilian Marine Corps official and obtained by The Associated Press, accuses the service of "gross mismanagement" that delayed deliveries of the trucks for more than two years.

Cost was a driving factor in the decision to turn down the request for the MRAPs — an acronym for mine-resistant, ambush-protected — according to the study. Stateside authorities saw the hulking vehicles, which can cost as much as a $1 million each, as a financial threat to programs aimed at developing lighter vehicles that were years from being fielded.

Warrior Wear: Uniforms With Built-In Tourniquet

A frustrated physician has designed a uniform with built-in tourniquets, ready for use on the extremities of the soldiers wearing the clothing. Only problem: the military has yet to approve its use.

Negotiating Shift in U.S. Role in Iraq

The United States and Iraq will soon begin negotiating a power shift for U.S. forces, nearly five years after they invaded Iraq and installed a new government, Iraqi and U.S. officials told NBC News on Thursday.

Both countries are working on assembling negotiating teams to shape a new long-term bilateral strategic agreement redefining the fundamental role of U.S. troops, whose mission would shift from combat operations to logistics and support, the officials told NBC News’ Richard Engel.

Door-to-Door Surveys in Iraq Put Death Toll at 150,000

MARILYNN MARCHIONE writes:

About 151,000 Iraqis died from violence in the three years after the United States invaded, concludes the best effort yet to count deaths _ one that still may not settle the fierce debate over the war's true toll on civilians and others.

The estimate comes from projections by the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government, based on door-to-door surveys of nearly 10,000 households. Experts called it the largest and most scientific study of the Iraqi death toll since the war began.

Its bottom line is far lower than the 600,000 deaths reported in an earlier study but higher than numbers from other groups tracking the count.

The new estimate covers a period from the start of the war in March 2003 through June 2006.

Reversing Iraq's Descent Into Mayhem

Tabassum Zakaria and Matt Spetalnick write:

MANAMA (Reuters) - President George W. Bush said on Saturday that America's new strategy had reversed Iraq's descent into mayhem and the United States was on track to complete the withdrawal of 20,000 troops by mid-year.

After talks at a base in the Kuwaiti desert with his military commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, Bush said security gains in Iraq "are allowing some U.S. forces to return home."

He added: "Any additional reduction will be based on the recommendation of General Petraeus, and those recommendations will be based entirely on the conditions on the ground in Iraq."

Bush conceded that until last year, "our strategy simply wasn't working," with Iraq riven by sectarian violence and al Qaeda militants strengthening their grip in many areas. He said the new strategy, involving a troop buildup and a focus on counter-insurgency warfare, was turning things around.

Operation Phantom Phoenix: Bombing Iraq

Today the NY Times reported,

American bombers and fighter aircraft dropped 40,000 pounds of bombs on suspected militant hide-outs, storehouses and defensive positions in the southern outskirts of Baghdad on Thursday, the United States military said.

In one of the largest airstrikes in recent months, two B-1 and four F-16 aircraft dropped 38 bombs within 10 minutes near the Latifiya district south of Baghdad, the military said. The airstrikes were accompanied by a large Iraqi and American ground assault.

The air attack was part of a nationwide joint offensive, dubbed Operation Phantom Phoenix, which includes a continuing sweep in Diyala Province, north of Baghdad, and raids Thursday in Salahuddin Province, northwest of the capital, between Samarra and Ramadi.

The operation took place as attacks against Iraqi security forces, American soldiers and Sunni Arab militias allied with the United States have increased in the last few weeks. A series of suicide bombings, assassinations and car bombs has threatened to reverse the downward trend in violence, especially in Baghdad, where dozens of people have been killed since the New Year.

On the 8th, RTT News reported,

In an effort to root out attempts by Al Qaeda-in-Iraq to regain strength in the country and to build on a recent reduction in violence, the multi-national force in Iraq has launched a major joint operation with Iraqi forces named Operation Phantom Phoenix.

In a press release issued on Tuesday, Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of Multi-National Corps - Iraq, said a series of joint Iraqi and coalition operations will pursue and neutralize remaining al-Qaeda in Iraq and other extremist elements.

Operation Phantom Phoenix will synchronize “lethal and non-lethal effects” to exploit recent security gains and disrupt terrorist support zones and enemy command and control. The non-lethal aspects are designed to improve delivery of essential services, economic development, and local governance capacity.

The division- and brigade-level operations will cover the entire country, the statement said. “Working closely with the Iraqi Security Forces, we will continue to pursue Al Qaeda and other extremists wherever they attempt to take sanctuary,” Odierno said.

I noticed right away, while reading RTT's report versus the report by the NY Times that in the first, the force is described directly as multi-national while in the latter, the NY Times downplays the force being multi-national with the United States acting essentially alone.

This isn't to say that the NY Times does not mention Iraqi forces, but it does seem that RTT is more direct in its description of the nature of the operation.

Lowest Levels of Violence in Iraq During Last Six Months

By PATRICK QUINN, Associated Press

BAGHDAD - Violence in Iraq is at its lowest levels since the first year of the American invasion, finally opening a window for reconciliation among rival sects, the second-ranking U.S. general said Sunday as Iraqi forces formally took control of security across half the country.

Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, the man responsible for the ground campaign in Iraq, said that the first six months of 2007 were probably the most violent period since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The past six months, however, had seen some of the lowest levels of violence since the conflict began, Odierno said, attributing the change to an increase in both American troops and better-trained Iraqi forces.

"I feel we are back in '03 and early '04. Frankly I was here then, and the environment is about the same in terms of security in my opinion," he said. "What is different from then is that the Iraqi security forces are significantly more mature."

Meanwhile, al-Qaida's No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri said in a new video posted Monday that the United States is trying to hide its failures in Iraq and warned that the mujahedeen there are increasing in strength.

Iraq is Your Fault

The Hot Zone: Conflict in Iraq

Playing Number Games: The War in Iraq

A post on CNN's anti-war agenda by Bob Parks at Canada Free Press...

But think about it. Listening to the major networks and print pubs war coverage is like listening to a football game...

...In war, the traditional way of gauging who is winning or not is, unfortunately, a count of battlefield casualties. It seems logical, the last man standing wins. But as I’ve always had problems with the media and their portrayal of things in the Middle East, I asked one simple question: how many of the enemy have we killed?

We have everyone from activists to actors to congressmen and women to pundits all telling us how many of our servicemen and women have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. People keep score in blogs and even on the sides of their homes, yet we never hear the one number that may put at ease, for some, the sacrifice made by our sons and daughters.

How many of the enemy have we killed? A simple question.

The beauty of being an online columnist is that when you throw a question out there, sometimes someone who knows something about the topic contacts you and gives you the answer, which I’m happy to pass on to you.

Larry Schweikart, Professor of History at the University of Dayton sent me the following:

"Last August, President Bush invited me and a few other military historians to spend an hour with him in the Oval Office. When I brought up this “enemy dead” issue, he shook his head and said, “I’m afraid since Vietnam and the ‘body counts’ we really can’t even use this as a measuring stick [as far as the public was concerned].” It was a sad commentary on how out of whack things got--especially if you think (as I do) that not all Muslims are terrorists. That means there are a finite number, and we have to be getting pretty close to the bottom of the barrel.

Since then, I’ve updated the numbers with refinements and calculate that a low estimate of 30,000 terrorists have been killed since 9/11, and an upperbound number of 60,000. On top of that, between 120 and 240,000 terrorists have been wounded. This is where it gets tricky. Likely because their medicine isn’t as good as ours, they have a higher death rate among wounded, which probably means that instead of 1 out of 8 dying of wounds, it’s more like 3 out of 8, and that number is in my first set of stats. In addition, we have captured close to 50,000 terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq since 9/11, and since the beginning of hostilities in Iraq, using traditional desertion rates, I figure at least another 10,000 jihadists have put away the old IED and gone home.

So, a low estimate is that we have removed from the order of battle about 210,000 on the low end to 360,000 on the high end. This is an entire generation of jihadists, and will, if nothing else, significantly feminize Muslim society."