OPERATION WHACK-A-MOLE CONTINUES

There aren't enough troops in the Surge to restore order to Iraq as a whole. As a result, the violence has shifted to areas where there aren't as many troops. Worse, our own military is lying again about the violence.

Iraq Body Count Running at Double Pace
Aug 25, 4:44 PM (ET)

By STEVEN R. HURST

BAGHDAD (AP) - This year's U.S. troop buildup has succeeded in bringing violence in Baghdad down from peak levels, but the death toll from sectarian attacks around the country is running nearly double the pace from a year ago.

Some of the recent bloodshed appears the result of militant fighters drifting into parts of northern Iraq, where they have fled after U.S.-led offensives. Baghdad, however, still accounts for slightly more than half of all war-related killings - the same percentage as a year ago, according to figures compiled by The Associated Press.

- Iraq is suffering about double the number of war-related deaths throughout the country compared with last year - an average daily toll of 33 in 2006, and 62 so far this year.

- Nearly 1,000 more people have been killed in violence across Iraq in the first eight months of this year than in all of 2006. So far this year, about 14,800 people have died in war-related attacks and sectarian murders. AP reporting accounted for 13,811 deaths in 2006. The United Nations and other sources placed the 2006 toll far higher.

- Baghdad has gone from representing 76 percent of all civilian and police war-related deaths in Iraq in January to 52 percent in July, bringing it back to the same spot it was roughly a year ago.

_According to the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, the number of displaced Iraqis has more than doubled since the start of the year, from 447,337 on Jan. 1 to 1.14 million on July 31.

However, Brig. Gen. Richard Sherlock, deputy director for operational planning for the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, said violence in Iraq "has continued to decline and is at the lowest level since June 2006."

He offered no statistics to back his claim,

...initial calculations validate fears that the Baghdad crackdown would push militants into districts north of the capital, including Diyala province where U.S. force and Iraqi soldiers have conducted major operation to clear its main city, Baqouba, of al-Qaida in Iraq fighters.

In July, the AP figures show 35 percent of all war-related killings occurred in northern provinces. The figure one year ago was 22 percent.

Nora Bensahel, a military analyst at the Rand Corp., said that northern Iraq had become increasingly destabilized over the past few months.

The insurgents have made a "concerted effort to concentrate attacks in other parts of the country," Bensahel said, in part to escape the increased U.S. troop presence in Baghdad and in part to give the impression that no place in Iraq is safe.

Mostly, she said, the insurgents have shifted their focus to the Baghdad suburbs, but they are particularly keen to undermine the notion that northern Iraq is a "success story" for Washington and its key Iraqi partners - including the Kurds who have maintained a near-autonomous state in the north since the early 1990s.

Staging attacks in the north "has a symbolic effect," she said.

And beyond that, Bensahel said the tactic puts the United States in a difficult situation.

"There isn't an ability to move north in any significant numbers without abandoning Baghdad" - a change in strategy that Washington is not prepared to make, she said.

...a huge problem also looms in the south, the center of Shiite political and spiritual influence and the site of Iraq's main oil fields.

There are daily gunbattles between the Mahdi Army militia - loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr - and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the powerhouse Shiite political party that controls most of the bureaucracy and police forces in southern Iraq.

This month, the governors of two southern provinces loyal to the Supreme Islamic Council were killed in roadside bombings.