New troops would necessarily be put to less-important uses than current troops if the goal doesn't change, but it did; hence the outsized effect on deaths. "The surge" was correctly known to mean hiring Sunnis to create their own counter-terrorism forces and using American troops more aggressively, which both allowed foreign jihadists to be killed or captured. Yet the sudden drop in violence was probably primarily related to a less often-cited ceasefire agreed to by Shia death squads not long after they knew that the law was going to be enforced, which may also have been due to the change in US strategy.
There was an earlier and smaller, yet still considerable drop (about 450 per month for the next sixth months over the previous six months) in IBC gunfire deaths in Baghdad from January 2007 to February. This coincided exactly with the start of the troop surge, which was concentrated in Baghdad, home to a quarter of the population but just over half of the violence.
Side Note: The gunfire-death drop appears as though it is not just in Baghdad, but this is because of the "Battle of Najaf", which I consider to be another outlier. It has multiple codings in the database, but the deaths were due primarily to coalition bombing rather than gunfire.
Gunfire deaths probably tilted heavily towards killings by security forces and Shia militia, and they took up a clear majority of civilian deaths before the drop. Perhaps this drop is more telling of the effect of the surge, both because of the timing and the fact that it is easier to track state-organized death squads whom soldiers were told to ignore than bomb-planting insurgents. Total IBC deaths did not drop until six months later, however.
Moqtada al Sadr had fled to Iran after the surge started. Early on, he only asked that his followers not try to fight Americans: "'We should try at all costs to avoid any confrontation with the American forces, and even if they raid our offices or our houses, we should try to avoid a confrontation,' [a Mahdi Army member recounting orders] said." At the end of April it was reported that "U.S soldiers encountered no resistance and found few weapons during recent patrols through the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City". (Edit) Iraq Body Count civilian deaths dropped starting at the beginning of August (after removing the Yazidi bombings), and by September were just over half the amount before August, continuing that way. Moqtada al-Sadr had publicly ordered a ceasefire on August 29. This can't be a coincidence, even if it was in the middle of, as opposed to before, the start of the drop in violence. The ceasefire had followed fighting with the Badr Brigade/ISCI during which about 50 pilgrims died in Karbala, and news organizations focused on how the ceasefire was a truce between those two groups. From this we know that the Badr Brigade must have been involved in a ceasefire of some sort, though the ISCI/Dawah government continued to fight supposedly Iranian-backed rogue elements of Sadr's Mahdi Army. Yet the Sadr ceasefire applied to all fighting, which includes sectarian fighting and explains the halving of civilian deaths from its 2006-2007 level. The drop in sectarian fighting cannot have been caused simply by Shia-Shia violence and the deaths of 50 pilgrims when for over a year an average of at least 100 people had been dying every day.
Rumsfeld must be responsible the pre-surge strategy and for the associated deaths regardless of which factors post-surge played the biggest role.
Side note on interpretation of the surge before the next section:
So the surge immediately forced the Mahdi Army to bend somewhat to the US military's will, and then after 7 months they (or most of them) decided that they could no longer maintain their war with the Sunnis, causing violence to drop. A drop so sudden was probably also not due to the completion of ethnic cleansing. While most have left, there are still Sunnis in Baghdad, some having been murdered or mass-arrested as ISIS moved closer to Baghdad.
(4/11/18): This claim about sectarian cleansing is the one I'm least confident of. In part 3 of Gareth Porter's 4-part series on the myth of Petraeus' success in Truthdig he notes that many think differently, and they could be right - it would make sense that six small Sunni enclaves just weren't seen as a threat, and the month of low violence before the ceasefire might be evidence for this. I do not agree that US troops were of little help after the surge, however. He notes that the Wolf Brigade would terrorize in Sunnis in Sunni-majority cities, which suggests that if troops didn't try to police the police during the surge, we would have seen the same level of violence continue after Baghdad lost its Sunnis.
Also, Porter used Petraeus/military statements about the start of the surge and predictions for peak troop levels, whereas I use the start of the increase in troop levels and the peak. For this reason, we make slightly different characterizations about the effect of the surge. Yet we agree on the main points that a troop shortage was hardly the major problem of the war (though if it was it still would have been Rumsfeld's fault); it was siding with Badr assassins.
Then why did we keep troops there?Rumsfeld chose a replacement for Army Chief of Staff Shinseki after Shinseki called for twice the number of troops as Rumsfeld in 2002. That might have contributed to the thinking behind this quote from D-Rep. Jon Murtha: "'They all knew the Rumsfeld rule: Your career is over if you say anything contrary' to his policies". His insistence on fewer troops, the firing of the Baathists and regular army, and the refusal to send "American soldiers out of their massive bases in Iraq and into Iraqi neighborhoods" while in office are all explained by this information.
The only thing which Rumsfeld and Cheney have on their side is the fact that we stayed there, whereas one might think we would leave if promoting violence was their goal. Yet leaving after blaming the insurgency on Al Qaeda, and while a civil war was developing, would have revealed what their intentions were, even though many Americans wanted the troops to leave. Staying there was a great way, and the only way, to prevent anyone from realizing what they wanted. I believe that, despite acquiescence from some in the top brass, ultimately pressure from the lower commanders in the military, the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Republican Party (given the political consequences) forced Cheney to change his position and fire Rumsfeld. That is based on this article and what I could read for free in Bob Woodward's "The War Within" (Google Books, starting from a mention of Badr). In fact, they could have been the reason why we didn't just leave very quickly.
Rumsfeld did say that we could leave when Iraqi security forces were constituted, even if violence hadn't ended. USA Today noted when explaining why the military didn't want to invest in expensive Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicles: "Gen. George Casey, the top commander in Iraq from June 2004 until February this year, repeatedly said that troop levels in Iraq would be cut just as soon as Iraqi troops took more responsibility for security. In March 2005, he predicted 'very substantial reductions' in U.S. troops by early 2006. He said virtually the same thing a year later. Casey wasn't the only optimist. In May 2005, Vice President Cheney declared that the insurgency was 'in its last throes.'"
Rumsfeld had previously pushed back on demands from the left to withdraw ASAP by saying that we can't have a timetable to let the insurgents in Iraq know how long to wait, nor to give them the impression that we can be pushed out of every Muslim country we're in (saying the terrorists want us out of Afghanistan and even the Philippines and Spain). He maintained at the same time that as we trained the ISF, we would drawdown.
Rumsfeld wrote a classified memo "one day before the midterm Congressional elections and two days before Mr. Rumsfeld resigned" in which he lists drawing down our forces and bases (from 55 to 5) as more attractive options while listing the current course, as well as sending more troops to Iraq and sending more troops to Baghdad as less attractive options. (paragraph added 1/28/18).
Casey also supported drawing down even after he was moved out of his position. Technically he got a promotion (to Chief of Staff of the Army), but that article suggests that Bush wanted him out of Iraq.
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