The lowest monthly American death toll in Iraq since the six-month-old surge began is providing encouragement to conservatives trying to stop a renewed effort by Democratic leaders to force a troop withdrawal.
Conservatives are also citing an article this week by two Democratic analysts who have been critical of the war’s management but who wrote in the New York Times that the Iraq conflict could be brought to a successful end.
Under the headline “A War We Just Might Win,” Brookings Institution scholars Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack said, “We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms.”
Their column has been quoted by Vice President Dick Cheney, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, radio talk show host Sean Hannity and other prominent backers of the war.
“They point to the high morale of our troops, a huge contrast with the mood here in Washington, D.C.,” said Cornyn at the Senate confirmation hearing of Adm. Michael Mullen to be the next Joint Chiefs chairman.
But P.J. Crowley, a former national security aide to President Bill Clinton and an analyst at the liberal Center for American Progress, told The Examiner that, while surge supporters can cite a few successes, “the big picture is still bleak.”
“The political progress that the surge is premised upon has not occurred within Iraq and is not likely to occur any time soon,” he said. “No one is taking on the militias. They are rearming for the next phase of the civil war.”
One indication that the addition of nearly 30,000 troops might be working is that fewer G.I.s were killed in July than in any of the surge’s previous five months. The 80 soldiers killed marked a 20 percent decrease from the number of deaths in June and May.
But Baghdad is still not secure. Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, chief military spokesman in Iraq, said the capital “is a place where there are very tough fights going on and there are still very difficult circumstances for the population.”
The Iraq war debate reaches a critical juncture next month. Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, will come to Washington to report on the war’s progress. Congress will then take up a bill to fund the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in fiscal 2008, beginning Oct. 1.
