Hell No, No Premonition Coulda Seen This!»

Seven months of declined U.S. casualties in Iraq are over — as even Bob Gates is acknowledging — with 48 fallen soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors taken from us in April. McClatchy reports that two soldiers were killed in Anbar last month — the first time troops died there since November. And yet those who continue to pimp and lie for the glory of the war call liberals the ones who ignore reality in Iraq.

Brandon Friedman takes his anger out — deservedly so — on Fareed Zakaria, Fred n’ Kim Kagan, Max Boot and Bill O’Reilly. PS, his casualty total is 51 KIA for April. Expect a revision upward in the total later this month from the Pentagon when it thinks no one is paying attention.

To make a calmer, more substantive point about what we’re seeing in Iraq. The rhythm of any protracted war goes something like this: you do stuff; the enemy responds; you adjust; so does he; and on and on until a point of decision is reached. An Air Force colonel named John Boyd once coined a useful (if jargony) term for this: The OODA Loop, where “OODA” stands for “Observation/Orientation/Decision/Action.” Boyd reasoned that the initiative in war goes to he who can achieve a faster OODA Loop than his enemy, and who can disrupt his enemy’s Loop.

At the risk of saying something disputable, from 2003 to mid-2007, the insurgencies in Iraq had faster OODA Loops than the U.S. did. That’s not to say that there weren’t discrete tactical successes: there were, and lots of them. But those developments are coterminous with the concept of the Loop — you adjust and inflict pain on the enemy; but the enemy does so faster and more powerfully. Once Operation Phantom Thunder began in the late spring of 2007, lots of people on the right and on the fake-left declared, without using Boyd’s term, that Petraeus and Odierno had finally broken the enemy’s Loop.

To make a further contention that will be disputed by historians: what Petraeus and Odierno actually did — and it is not a small achievement — was disrupt the insurgencies’ Loops more than any other U.S. commanders were able to. They kept the insurgencies in a state of confusion for months and prevented successful orientation. But the rise in U.S. and Iraqi civilian casualties demonstrates that the insurgencies’ Loops have now closed. To cash it out, the U.S. military under Petraeus and Odierno bought as much calm as possible, and Iraq has been so horrific for so long that half the horror could seem like paradise to the hopeful American. But even with half-the-horror, no strategic goal was achieved. And no strategic goal can be achieved now that the insurgencies’ Loops have closed. (I would contend that a war contrary to American interests from the start can never end in victory by definition, only mitigation, but let’s leave that aside.)

Not only was all of this foreseeable, it was foreseen. A year and a half later, what has the Bush administration done to merit the sacrifices it demanded of 48-51 Americans in April 2008? Of the hundreds of Americans who died for the surge? Of the nearly 4100 Americans who died for the war?