Turning Points in the War

Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, 2003, here is a list of various turning points in the war:

July 22, 2003 - Uday and Qusay are killed.
December 13, 2003 - Saddam Hussein captured.
June, 2004 - Sadr surrenders
June 28, 2004 - Transfer of sovereignty
November, 2004 - Fallujah captured
January 30, 2005 - Elections

It strikes me that the pro-war side has consistently misinterpreted the significance of these events.
Looking at the coalition fatalities, we find several things:

The capture of Qusay and Uday supposedly reduced the strucutre and power of the insurgency. However, this is only reflected in the death tolls if we assume that hte reduction in hostile fatalities from 28 in July o 18 in September is more than a conincidence. And in any case, they went up right afterward in October.

The capture of Saddam had no major effect on the fatalities; looking at the December fatalities shows that the reduction in fatalities from November ot December had been happening anyway - and in any case, November had such an unusually high number of casualties that it isn't a good reference point. And other than February, every month since December 2003 has had more hostile fatalities than any month from May 2003 to September 2003, and every month since January 2004 (except Febraury 2004) has had more hostile fatalities than any month from May 2003 to October 2004.

Al-Sadr's defeat reduced fatalities compared to those of April and May 2004, but every month from June 2004 on has had more hostile fatalities than any month from May 2003 to March 2004 except for November, so it hasn't broken the back of the insurgency or anything.

Now, the transfer of sovereignty was the biggest boo-boo of them all. We were supposed to believe that this would break the back of the insurgency and that they feared it so much that they would go all out to stop it. Supposely, June 2004 would have the most spectacular, tremendous attacks of the war, and the nthings would die down in July. As it turns out, June had fewer hostile deaths than April or May, July had the same number of hostile deaths as June, and then things got worse in August and September. The "transfer of sovereignty" neither discouraged the insurgents, nor did they do much to stop it. (Why would they/ It idn't actually mean anything).

The capture of Fallujah hasn't seemed to have much effect either. If current trends continue, January will have a hostile death toll similr to that of December and October. Things are quieter than in August or September, but this appears to have started before the siege began in November. Of course, it goes without saying that fatalities are way below where they were in November, but that is because of the high cost of the invasion of Fallujah itself; to auge the impact, we need o look a the periods prior to the invasion and after the completion of the invasion, and there seems little change there.

Finally, it appears as if there is no wave of increasing violence as elections approach. If the insurgents are afraid of elections, I'm not seeing them act to prevent them.

I don't think that we will see any major increase in attacks prior to the election, or any major attempt to derail the election.
However, I don't think that the election will change much, either. Things will stay much as they are, although I have a feeling that the general trend will be for them to get worse.
I suppose that a Sunni rebellion if they don't get enough representation is possible, but I think that we can head it off for now. A sudden uprising hasn't started yet, and I don't think it will now. Rather, any uprising will be more of what we are seeing now - a gradual escalation.

That is all.