Just how successful is this surge?

President Bush and his supporters have made a great deal out of the fact that deaths of ordinary Iraqis from roaming death squads have fallen since Bush's "surge" was initiated, but they are being much quieter about the fact that American deaths in Baghdad have doubled during the first seven weeks of the security plan when compared to the previous period.

The death rates for American troops has remained the same overall, but this is because they have pulled troops out of other areas to concentrate on Baghdad, which has become a much more dangerous place for US troops.

In the northern and western provinces where they hold sway, and even in parts of Baghdad, Sunni Arab insurgents have sharpened their tactics, using more suicide car and vest bombs and carrying out successive chlorine gas attacks.

Even as officials have sought to dampen the insurgency by trying to deal with Sunni Arab factions, those groups have become increasingly fractured. There are now at least a dozen major Sunni insurgent groups — many fighting other Sunnis as well as the Americans and the Shiite-led government. A deal made with any one or two would be unlikely to be acceptable to the others.

As Iraq continues to fracture, Bush is placing his troops into the middle of a civil war, a fact that he is anxious to keep from the American public, as his administration seems to be the last people on Earth to publicly admit that this is what is now taking place in Iraq.

While Shiite militias appear to have quieted in Baghdad so far, elements of them have been fighting pitched battles outside the city, sometimes against one another, sometimes against Sunni Arabs. They are pushing Sunnis out of their homes and attacking their mosques.

And in a new tactic, both Shiite and Sunni militants have been burning down homes and shops in the provinces in recent months.

The idea behind the "surge" appears to be that if you control the capital, then it naturally follows that you control the country. Although this seems to be a very strange thing for Mr Bush to believe, especially as he is so fresh from the experience of Afghanistan, where Karzai's government control Kabul but have almost no control of anything outside it. Therefore it would appear to me that the logic behind the "surge" is flawed, as it is ignoring the entire experience of Afghanistan and implying that repeating that experience in Iraq is somehow going to have the opposite effect.

They say that repeating the same actions and expecting it to have the opposite effect is the very definition of madness, and it would certainly appear that desperation has led Bush and his supporters to employ that very logic in an attempt to salvage anything that might be labelled success in a war that most of us now accept has been lost.

Many of the new troops are joining long-term garrisons along with Iraqi forces in particularly violent neighborhoods of Baghdad, keeping up frequent patrols and trying to strengthen relations with Iraqis by meeting with local leaders and residents.

That has put the Americans in the middle of sectarian battlegrounds, and their death rate in the city has nearly doubled. The number of Americans killed in combat or other violence rose to 53 in Baghdad in the first seven weeks of the push, from Feb. 14 to April 2. That is up from 29 in the seven weeks before then.

So, the American death rate in Baghdad has doubled as Bush attempts to take control of the city, even though taking this city - if we are to follow the example of Kabul - will likely have no effect on the rest of the country.

But what effect is the surge having on the number of Iraqis killed? Neither the US nor the Iraq government release figures for civilian deaths so it is always going to be very hard to work this out.

Over the past seven weeks, American commanders say that the security push has had some success so far in cutting down the number of sectarian execution-style killings — tracked by counting the number of bodies found with gunshot or knife wounds. Military officials say that such killings have dropped 26 percent nationwide and even more in Baghdad.

But other kinds of attacks, like car bombings, have kept the overall civilian death rate high, and in recent days there are anecdotal reports that sectarian executions may be on the rise again.

“We’ve not seen the overall same significant amount of decline in the overall number of casualties” as in execution killings, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, spokesman for the American military command, said in a news conference last week.

So the death rates amongst civilians appears to be dropping with regard to executions, but appears to remain high regarding car bombs and other kinds of attacks.

Therefore, the "success" of this "surge" is being sold on one fact alone, the fact that execution type deaths are down. Deaths of ordinary Iraqis from all other manner of killings - car bombs, suicide bombs etc - remains the same and the death rates of American soldiers within Baghdad has doubled.

That's a strange kind of "success", especially as the desired end result - control of Baghdad - has already been shown in Kabul to have no effect on the rest of the country.

I suppose desperate times call for desperate measures... and George Bush is now very desperate indeed.

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Tags: surge and accelerate, Iraq war, Bush, more troops, escalation, Baghdad