On October 16, the UN Office of Humanitarian Assistance's IRIN news service reported that electricity and clean water are now "luxuries for most Iraqis". For example, Baghdad, a city with 6 million residents, gets no more than four to six hours of electricity a day.
"Electricity in Iraq is going from bad to worse, and every month we have fewer hours of power", Baghdad resident Salahdinne Alawi told IRIN. In addition, before 2003 the water "was clean and healthy", Alawi explained, "but today it is not recommended for drinking, making the lives of ordinary Iraqis more difficult instead of improving them".
IRIN also reported that close to 60% of Iraqis are unemployed and "30% inflation over the past year makes it increasingly difficult for families to afford food". "At least" 70% of Iraqis depend on food rations — almost double the figure during Saddam Hussein's rule — according to government officials and NGOs, IRIN reported.
"The lack of essential needs has provoked revolt from the population", said Nissirin Hummam of the Iraq Aid Association.
According to the October 15 Washington Post, a 10-member commission set up by the US Congress — with President George Bush's endorsement — to review Washington's counterinsurgency war strategy in Iraq has concluded that the current strategy is failing.
The commission, called the Iraq Study Group (ISG), is headed by James Baker III, former US secretary of state, long-time Republican political strategist and lawyer for ExxonMobil. It is due to make a report by early next year.
"It's not going to be 'stay the course'. The bottom line is, [current US strategy] isn't working", one participant told the Post on condition of anonymity.
Indeed, Washington's strategy of attempting to "clear and hold" cities of Iraqi resistance fighters has proved to be a complete failure. The August 16 New York Times reported that an unnamed "senior" Pentagon official told it the anti-occupation insurgency had "more public support" than "at any point in time".
This was confirmed by an early September poll by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes, which found 61% of Iraqis approved of attacks on the US-led occupation forces — up from 47% in January. The increase was mostly among Shiite Iraqis.
The September 11 Washington Post reported that Colonel Peter Devlin, chief of intelligence for the US Marine Corps in Iraq, had sent a secret report to the Pentagon on August 16 saying that the 30,000 US troops deployed in Iraq's western Anbar province had been fought to a stalemate and lost political control of the province to anti-US "insurgents".
The Post's October 15 article on the Baker commission reported that the leading option it is discussing in its closed-door meetings is titled "Stability First". This calls for stepping up the current effort to "stabilize Baghdad, boosting efforts to entice insurgents into politics, and bringing Iran and Syria into plans to end the fighting".
In an October 10 TV interview, Baker said the commission "believes that there are alternatives between the stated alternatives, the ones that are out there in the political debate of 'stay the course' and 'cut and run' ... I personally believe in talking to your enemies." He added that Washington needed to consider enlisting Syria and Iran's help in "stablising" Iraq.
"To bring them in, we need to stop emphasising things like democracy and start emphasising things like stability and territorial integrity", James Dobbins, a former US envoy to Afghanistan and adviser to the ISG, told the Post. "We need to stop talking about regime change. It's unreasonable to think you can stabilise Iraq and destabilise Iran and Syria at the same time."
Since mid-July, the US military has pursued a "stabilise Baghdad first" strategy, doubling the number of US troops in the Iraq capital. But this has only resulted in a rise in the number of US casualties.
The October 15 New York Times reported that 29 US troops were killed in Baghdad in September — twice as many as in June. It added: "In recent weeks, the number of troops wounded in action, a figure that usually parallels the number of fatalities, has also seen a sharp increase. In a two-week period that began on Sept. 28, some 428 American troops were wounded, one of the highest fortnightly tolls of the entire conflict."
On October 18, Associated Press reported that 70 US troops had been killed in combat since the beginning of the month. "October is now on track to be the deadliest month for American forces in Iraq since November 2004, when military offenses primarily in the then-insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, left 137 troops dead ..."