Fw: Benchmarks: Hard to find good news in Iraq

 

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Subject: Benchmarks: Hard to find good news in Iraq

 http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20050729-035958-3382r

 

Benchmarks: Hard to find good news in Iraq

By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Published July 29, 2005

 

WASHINGTON -- It was another very bad week indeed in Iraq:
    
    A roadside bomb killed four U.S. soldiers from the Georgia National Guard; 16 Iraqi government workers were killed when their buses traveling together were machine-gunned by insurgents and two Algerian diplomats kidnapped by al-Qaida in Iraq were killed.

 

In addition, a U.S. Government Accountability Office report issued Thursday documented the impact of the insurgency in seriously derailing reconstruction efforts. And a psychiatric survey concluded that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a serious mental illness, was 10 times more prevalent in American combat veterans from Iraq than had been previously thought.
    
    The GAO report documented how the costs of fighting the insurgency had dealt crippling blows to reconstruction plans. It said $1.8 billion intended for major electrical utilities and water projects during Fiscal Year 2004 had been diverted to pay for security forces instead.
    
    In all, $4.7 billion, or about one quarter of the total $18.4 billion that Congress had approved in emergency funding since July 2004 to rebuild Iraq has had to be switched to other unanticipated needs, the GAO said.
    
    It also noted that far from having Iraq's oil industry up and running within a few weeks or months of toppling Saddam Hussein, as Department of Defense policymakers had optimistically expected at the time, crude oil production and total electrical power generation in Iraq has still not even reached the modest levels they were at before military operations to topple Saddam began in March 2003.
    
    Also on Thursday, Army Surgeon-General Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley told reporters that a survey of 1,000 U.S. troops who had returned from Iraq showed that 30 percent of them developed stress-related mental health problems three to four months after coming home.
    
    That was a 10 times higher percentage than the 3 to 5 percent previously diagnosed with significant mental health problems immediately after they left the Iraq combat theater.
    
    The survey, therefore, suggested that the long-term psychiatric problems afflicting U.S. veterans of the Iraq war will be far more numerous and severe than anyone had previously anticipated.
    
    According to the Iraq Index Project of the Brookings Institution, 22 U.S. soldiers were killed in the seven days from July 20 to July 27. That was more than twice the number of the previous week and almost four times the number -- six -- killed the week before that.
    
    This brought the total number of U.S. fatalities in Iraq from all causes since the start of military operations to topple Saddam to 1,790, of whom 1,380 were killed in hostile incidents. Some 17 of the 22 U.S. fatalities in the past week from July 20 to July 27 were killed in such incidents, the IIP said.
    
    The number of U.S. troops wounded in action from the beginning of hostilities on March 19, 2003 through Wednesday, July 27 was 13,657, an increase of 98 compared with the previous week. This was a little worse than the 76 killed during the week of July 13-20, but still less than half the 293 U.S. soldiers wounded from July 6 to July 13, according to the IIP figures.
    
    Nevertheless, well over 100 U.S. troops are now being wounded per week, many of them grievously, losing limbs or suffering permanent brain damage. That amounts to well over 5,000 per year.
    
    In all, 52 Iraqi police and troops were killed by the insurgents from July 20 to July 27, including the 16 killed in the attack on the buses. That brought the total number of Iraq military and police killed from June 1, 2003 to Wednesday of this week 2,717. Through the month of July up to July 27, 240 Iraqi police and soldiers were killed by the insurgents, the IIP said.
    
    The total toll of Iraqi police killed during the month of July, therefore, looks likely to still be a little less than the 296 killed in June and the 270 killed in May. But that is really cold comfort because it is still far higher than any other month in the insurgency so far.
    
    The total number of Iraqi police and military killed per month never came near to 200 per month until March this year, and has never been below it since. As Jeffrey White, the respected military analyst of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told UPI this week, the overall trend of casualties inflicted by the insurgents continues to inch relentlessly upwards.
    
    At least, the number of multiple casualty car bombings in July up to July 27 was significantly down compared with the record highs of May and June. There were 30 such attacks in June but only 20 so far this month up to July 27, a decrease of 33 percent.
    
    The number of casualties in multiple casualty bombings, however, was significantly higher in July than it had been in June. Up to July 27, already 254 people were killed in such attacks compared with 228 for the entire month of June. However, the number of people injured in such attacks dropped significantly from 528 in June to 464 in June, the IIP said.
    
    U.S. strategic hopes in Iraq now more than ever are pinned on the hope that the 100 battalions of the new Iraqi army and security forces will be able to take up the burden of combat and defense increasingly in the coming months. But the it has yet to be established that they will be able to do so.
    
    As documented in previous "Benchmarks," "Operation Lightning," the first major active use of these forces, put 23,000 of them out on to the streets of Baghdad, but it failed to dent the level of insurgency at all. On the contrary, attacks and casualties inflicted went on to peak in May and June, and have only dropped by relatively small amounts since then.