U.S. Claims Success in Iraq Despite Onslaught

"The problem is, I have seen no meaningful" goal posts, said Anthony Cordesman, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, "and a great many conflicting points" on U.S. claims to be winning against the insurgency.

While the U.S. military seems to have made some progress in parts of the west and parts of Baghdad, Cordesman said, "it isn't clear in doing so that it has really crippled any part of the insurgency."

Jeffrey White, an analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said insurgents have fought U.S.-led forces to a stalemate at least in Anbar province, northern Babil province and some other areas.

The Meaning of Victory

After generally rejecting body counts as standards of success in the Iraq war, the U.S. military last week embraced them -- just as it did during the Vietnam War. As the carnage grew in Baghdad, U.S. officials produced charts showing the number of suspects killed or detained in offensives in the west.

Lynch, the military spokesman, cited killings and detentions of 1,534 insurgents in the region. The fact that the number of insurgents killed or captured in the northern city of Tall Afar was roughly equal to advance estimates of their strength, he said, was proof that insurgents weren't simply escaping to fight another day -- and that U.S. forces were doing more than razing infrastructure. "Zarqawi is on the ropes," Lynch told reporters.

It was not clear, however, how many of those detained or killed in the offensives were insurgents. Since 2003, U.S. forces have detained 40,000 people, twice U.S. generals' highest public estimate of the number of fighters in the insurgency. On Saturday, the Iraqi government said it had released for lack of evidence more than 500 of the 757 suspects detained in ongoing operations in the northern city of Mosul.

Many of the men detained in Tall Afar last week were rounded up on the advice of local teenagers who had stepped forward as informants, at times for what American soldiers said they suspected amounted to no more than settling local scores.

"The question is, what does victory mean? It certainly isn't the number of people we kill or detain," Cordesman said. The U.S. death and detention counts have "zero credibility," since U.S. forces provide little detail on those being killed and detained, he said.

U.S. military officials have set broad goals for what constitutes victory in Iraq, including denying terrorists a haven and reducing the insurgency to a level that the fledgling Iraqi security forces can handle. The United States aims to leave behind an Iraq with a representative government that respects human rights and is at peace with its neighbors, the officials said.

The effort against the insurgency clearly has made some gains. Iraqi forces, disbanded in 2003, have been rebuilt to 190,000 trained and equipped members, according to U.S. figures. With Saddam Hussein-era veterans leading them, the Iraqi forces appear to be a credible army in some areas.

Iraq's disaffected Sunni Arab minority has been at least partly persuaded to join the political process to regain a measure of its power, a shift that might help defuse the homegrown part of the insurgency. And Iraqis as a whole show little support for Zarqawi and have resisted his efforts to goad Sunnis and Shiites into civil war.

From Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, down to his underlings, American officials have insisted this summer that, at the least, the insurgency is not growing. Pressed to explain the claim, U.S. military officials said recently that they meant only that they believe the insurgency remains concentrated in no more than four of Iraq's 18 provinces.