Failure to halt Iraqi violence revealed by Pentagon report

The final contingent of US troops in the "surge" against Iraq's resistance deploys today amid deepening gloom in Washington at the military's failure to reduce violence and defeat the insurgency.

The latest arrivals take up their positions as the Pentagon released the first hard assessment of President George Bush's gamble in stepping up the war in Iraq. The report, a comprehensive statistical analysis of the three months from mid-February to mid-May, reveals failure on most fronts in Iraq and no overall decrease in violence that the President had hoped for.

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Over the past three months, US troops have been pouring into Baghdad and Anbar province, setting up fortified positions in the areas of fiercest resistance. The Pentagon's report to Congress reveals that the arrival of fresh combat troops has merely shifted the violence away to other parts of the country.

Despite the gloomy assessment, the US commander in Iraq General David Petraeus gave an extraordinary interview to USA Today newspaper in which he said "astonishing signs of normalcy" have returned to two-thirds of Baghdad. "I'm talking about professional soccer leagues with real grass field stadiums, several amusement parks - big ones, markets that are very vibrant," the commander of some 150,000 U.S. troops said. These unlikely scenes were, he said, a sign that the new strategy was working, even though many problems remain to be fixed.

Although Gen Petraeus painted a scene which few correspondents reporting from Iraq appear to recognise, he would have been fully briefed on the 46-page report, which the Democrat-controlled Congress has asked for on a quarterly basis.

As described in yesterday's Washington Post, the Pentagon's report said that while there have been some gains by the US military against the insurgents, there have been as many setbacks. The report quickly dispels the initial optimism expressed by the new US Defence Secretary Robert Gates who last March characterised progress in Iraq as "so far, so good".

The Pentagon now says it is too early to say whether the President's strategy is going to work. That task has been left in the hands of Gen Petraeus and the US Ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, who are to report to Washington in September on the policy's effectiveness. Their conclusion will either speed up or delay the eventual withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq being demanded by US public opinion.

Should it officially be deemed a failure by Gen Petraeus, the ground is being prepared in Washington - on both sides of the political divide - to blame the administration of Nouri al-Maliki for that failure. "If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people - it will lose the support of the Iraqi people," Mr Bush said last January. "Now is the time to act."

The Pentagon said yesterday that Mr Maliki's government was "uneven" in living up to its promises and in many cases produced no successes. There was "little progress" by the Iraqi leadership in bringing about reconciliation between Shia, Kurdish and Sunni sides. This was "a serious, unfulfilled objective", which "some analysts see a growing fragmentation of Iraq".

Describing a sharp drop in sectarian killings and attacks from February to April - they rose steeply last year - the report also says that civilian casualties rose to more than 100 a day, largely, it appears, as a result of suicide bombings. The number of suicide attacks has more than doubled across Iraq to 58 in a three-month period from April to May.

Two relative successes have been Baghdad and Anbar, where most of the extra 30,000 US combat troops are deployed. However violence increased in eastern and northern Iraq, to where the insurgents have moved. In Anbar, where Sunni tribes are fighting al-Qa'ida forces in Iraq, the report claims that attacks have dropped by about a third. But violence "has increased in most provinces, particularly in the outlying areas of Baghdad province and Diyala and Ninewa provinces", the report said. In Baqubah, Diyala's capital, US and Iraqi fighters "have been unable to diminish rising sectarian violence contributing to the volatile security situation", it said.