Via Knight-Ridder, I see that the official preliminary totals for the Iraqi constitutional referendum are coming in. While the final results aren't in yet, so far it looks like both Anbar and Salahuddin have overwhelmingly rejected the constitution, Salahuddin by 81%, thereby indicating that the opponents as well as the supporters of the consitution seem to have turned out in large numbers.
Courtesy of reader AMac, the preliminary figures for voter turnout are also available.
The Knight-Ridder piece also gives us an idea of the situation in Diyala:
In the mixed province of Diyala, just northwest of Baghdad, where Sunnis and Shiites are roughly evenly distributed, the "yes" and "no" votes are running almost neck and neck, with 51.76 percent voting "yes" and 48.24 percent "no."
If the Diyala votes hold up, that then leaves Nineveh, whose results are not being announced (along with Irbil, Babil, and Basra) as the deciding factor in whether the constitution is accepted or rejected. We do get some good news from the Electoral Commission, however:
Iraqi election commissioner Safwat Rashid said that no evidence of "significant violations" has so far been uncovered but that the audit is likely to delay the final result at least two more days.
Depending on what he means by this, it would seem that the type of widespread abuses that have been alleged by Saleh Mutlaq didn't occur to the degree that he some of his statements to Western and Arab media outlets would seem to suggest. That's a far cry from what I'd like and even in of itself doesn't preclude the kind of Tammany Hall politics we've experienced here in the United States at various stages in our history, but it does seem to indicate that none of the major Iraqi parties were on an organizational level out to thwart the voting process. Given, as many observers have pointed out, that Iraq doesn't have a terribly long tradition of representative democracy, this should be viewed as a very positive development.
The article also notes another interesting point:
Recent weeks have witnessed reduced insurgent violence targeting the Iraqi population, but there has been no letup in the rate of attacks against U.S. forces.
I actually think that violence has been going down (at least from where it was when the insurgents started mounting attacks in a big way in April) for a longer period than that, particularly with regard to the number as well as the scope of mass casualty terrorist attacks in the country. While these types of terrorist attacks are the most visible symbol of the Iraqi insurgency, they are not the ones that are the most lethal killers of US troops, as this New York Times story on the fighting in Ramadi helps to illustrate:
The vast majority of Americans killed here since September have been victims of homemade bombs, what the military calls improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s. Sgt. William Callahan, a member of the bomb disposal team stationed with the Third Battalion, estimated that troops hit four such bombs a day in Ramadi. Most do not result in death or serious injury. Almost all are remotely detonated, which means someone is hiding in wait for coming vehicles.
There are a couple of ways one can read the partial shift from targeting Iraqi civilians to targeting US troops. One is that most of the mass casualty terrorist attacks against Iraqi civilians are perpetrated by Abu Musab Zarqawi and his allies and that they've been sufficiently weakened by US counter-insurgency efforts (as my good friend Bill Roggio has documented in exsquite detail over at the Fourth Rail) to the point where they're still recouping their recent losses. Another is that all of the domestic insurgent groups that committed themselves to the referendum through their various proxies see no real contradiction between killing US troops while trying to pursue a political deal with fellow Iraqis, at least at this time. Finally, there's the view that the insurgents are more or less lying low for now in the belief that the constitution will either be rejected or that enough Sunnis will reject the legitimacy of the vote and throw in with them, hence they don't see a reason to rock the boat right now by staging any mass casualty attacks that might prompt such individuals to throw in with the government.
That said, a drop in violence is still a drop in violence, as is the fact that a lot of Sunnis are now engaged in the political process, even as an opposition force, rather than operating outside of it. As I think Eric has noted in the past, there are definite fault lines between the various insurgent groups, some of which are far more open to political participation than others. For those that are willing to come to the table (and it seems to me that several are there right now by proxy), the effort should now be made to keep them there as long as possible and incorporate them into the system. One such method for doing so that I've discussed with Bill Roggio on occasion is the idea of an Algeria-style amnesty offer for various domestic insurgent groups that are willing to deal. While Iraq now has a sovereign government that will have to weigh the costs and benefits of such a proposal, it would seem a measure at least worth considering at this point.
If the Diyala votes hold up, that then leaves Nineveh, whose results are not being announced...
On October 17th, the AP reported the following in the initial tally for Nineveh:
NINEVAH (Mosul)
Source
Is that just for Mosul or for the entire province? I realize it was an initial count, but from the above info it looks pretty good.
Wouldn't it be something if the referendum passed by a narrow margin that could possibly be attributed to the last minute negotiations that brough aboard some Sunni?
#1 Mixed Humor, the initial reports from Mosul was based on a partial count. Ninewah had a 58% turnout. Which would put the actual number of votes in the 600-700 thousand range.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L21258859.htm
So how do we stop the Sunnis from targeting American troops?
I am always conflicted by WoC and GlobalGuerrillas' postings.
Case in point, the same day Dan Darling claims "That said, a drop in violence is still a drop in violence, as is the fact that a lot of Sunnis are now engaged in the political process, even as an opposition force, rather than operating outside of it."
While Jon Robb at GG states:
"On a side note, the US military's inability to reverse neither the Iraqi insurgency's tempo of operations nor its rate of innovation has created a stressed system that may result in a moral turning point. As one analyst suggested to me, it is only a matter of time now before Iraqi guerrillas overrun a US fire-base. The loss of life and drama from that event could cause a rapid collapse in our moral cohesion."
And Jon Robb points to the virtual shutdown of oil exports out of Iraq - this is a critical issue to Iraq, to say the least.
Let me leave this posting with simply: "What the heck is going on in Iraq?"
Mixed Humor:
That's still a possibility at this point, we'll just have to wait and see.
Richard1:
That's the question, isn't it?
DJPR:
I'm not a regular reader of GlobalGuerrillas, but I'm a little skeptical of the claim that Iraqi insurgents will be able to successfully overrun a US firebase. All of their major assaults of that nature (think the ill-fated charge against Abu Ghraib prison earlier this year) have failed in a fairly dramatic fashion and with heavy losses on their side. The whole point of assymetrical warfare is that one side is unable to fight the other in a conventional manner and that every time the insurgents have tried they get slaughtered. Should they resort to such attempts, they're only going to make it easier for us to kill them.
I'm inclined to side with Dan Darling on the question of whether or not there's any serious danger of guerrila groups winning the sort of tactical victory that DJPR is talking about. To date, the insurgents have lost, to my knowledge, every single open engagement with US military forces.
There's a reason, after all, that a staggering proportion of the American casualties in Iraq are the result of IED's or suicide bombs.
"So how do we stop the Sunnis from targeting American troops?"
Ultimately, by not having American troops in country to target.
"As one analyst suggested to me, it is only a matter of time now before Iraqi guerrillas overrun a US fire-base"
The more successful the political arm of Iraq goes, the more completely unsubstantiated the predictions by anti-war types have become. How the number of IEDs going off point to the likelihood of an American position being overrun, particularly when in the same diagnosis the number of actual small arms attacks has vastly decreased, is beyond me. Was an American firebase ever overrun in Vietnam btw?
No one who is fully aware of exactly how much firepower a Army/Marine Corps rifle squad has would expect any thing larger than a team sized unit to be overrun.
The goal of the enemy is not to win on the battlefield, but to distroy our will to fight at home.
DJPR,
GG is an interesting site. Iraq has a monumental election and their story for the day is a rebuttle to Thomas Barnett???
Full disclosure. I supported the war and still do, but I think this assessment is misleading:
"I actually think that violence has been going down (at least from where it was when the insurgents started mounting attacks in a big way in April) for a longer period than that, particularly with regard to the number as well as the scope of mass casualty terrorist attacks in the country."
If by violence you mean only a warfare which is sufficiently intense to qualify as 'conventional', then sure violence has been going 'down' since Second Fallujah. But the more obvious reading of 'violence...going down' is that attacks of all sorts have decreased or at least decreased in effectiveness. That is simply not true.
There are several ways to divide the war, but I think it divides into four large periods.
1) March & April 2003: This is the period of the initial invasion. Measured in terms of casualties, violence tends to increase through this period before tapering off rapidly after the fall of Bagdad.
2) May 2003 through April 2004: This is the period if initial insurgency primarily organized by Baathist elements hoping to restore Sadaam Hussein. With the exception of the First Ramadan Offensive, violence in this period peaks in the middle and tends to taper off to a minimal background level toward the end of the period. By later standards (and heck by the historical standards of warfare in general), violence throughout this period is extremely low. November brings a big upswing in attacks, but it also brings the capture of Saddaam Hussein and the defacto end of the Baathist insurgency.
3) April 2004 through March 2005: The dominating events of this period is 1st Fallujah in April 2004, and 2nd Fallujah in November of that year. The US gets taken by surprise by a joint offensive by Al Sadr's Badr brigades in the south and Al Zaqari's Al Queda lead insurgency in the North. Extremely blood fighting follows until the US takes Fallujah in November, after which violence slowly tapers off to a level near that of before the start of the period.
4) April 2005 to present: It's too early to say what exactly is going on but this period (as predicted) is dominated by the fight to control the two rivers, and slow territorial and political gains by coalition forces. But violence is certainly not slacking off. If anything, the most important feature of this period is an unwavering background death rate resulting from the insurgents successful deployment of advanced IED's. From April 2005 to present, the US military has suffered on average about 2 deaths a day. This total has spiked up and down, but as best as I can tell this is purely random noise. If you look at the total for wounded per month, or attacks per month, you find that its virtually unchanged for the whole period. What you might find is that the majority of attacks are being confined to an increasingly small section of the whole country, but you won't find a downward (or upward) trend in the violence itself. This of course doesn't mean much for determining who is winning, since neither side is necessarily suffering casualties that are theoretically unsustainable indefinately. Nor do the raw numbers tell us much about operational tempo or the achievement of objectives. But I think that it is misleading to suggest that violence is actually trending downward.
As for the idea that the insurgents are going to 'run over' a US firebase, I think that's ridiculous. As a conventional army I think that it is clear that the insurgency has been severely depleted by the conflict. At the height of its effectiveness as a conventional fighting force, the insurgents were never able to overrun US positions, and have consistantly gotten their ass handed to them. I think that what you have thier is someone seeing Iraq through lens colored by Veitnam. The intensity of the violence has never approached anywhere near that of Veitnam for some very obvious reasons. The NVA was a real army, and the AIF have nothing like a real army to put into the field. The VC was a real guerilla force, and the AIF have nothing even like a real guerilla force to put into the field and previously have gotten waxed hard any time they have even tried to create one. The quality of the 'soldiery' that the insurgents have fielded has always been very very low. At present, the AIF are almost entirely dependent on IED's of various sorts (roadside bombs, suicide bombers, car bombs) to inflict casualties. Other than that, the best they can do is terrorism (killing and intimidating civilians) and economic warfare (sabotage of infrastructure to keep quality of life low). By any raw measurement, Iraq is nothing like Veitnam.
"And Jon Robb points to the virtual shutdown of oil exports out of Iraq - this is a critical issue to Iraq, to say the least."
I don't know where that information comes from. My information is that given the recent spike in oil prices, Iraq made more revenue from oil in the last quarter than at any point in its history. Do to attacks on pipelines, oil production has been suppressed but it has been by no means shut down.
Good stuff Celebrim. Its been a tough road and will last a good while longer, but prospects look reasonably good by any historical standard. Phase 5 will see Iraqi forces reaching a critical mass and US forces begin to be drawn down. The effect this should have on the insurgency when combined with a entirely elected Iraqi government will be significant. US troops pulling out under our own voalition will be another major turning point. The excuse of US occupation will end and that will be the end of the indigenous insurgency in any meaningful way.
Celebrim,
Do the 2 deaths per day include those who die by non-combat causes? Also, do you have a link to the reference on oil profits?
Really interestin poin of view, celebrim...Of course Iraq doesn't directly equate to Vietnam...Vietnam took longer then expected, hostilities in Iraq are continuous and it seems won't end.The problem is, Iraq seems worse by comparison according to your own list of talking points.
In terms of loss of life, Vietnam was worse by far. The US death totals over the whole operation in Iraq are less than a week's casualties in Vietnam.