As of today, only two of the five combat brigades slated to go to Iraq under Bush's surge plan have arrived.  The other three won't be in place until June.  And already, the surge has failed.

These are the goals of the surge:

1) Putting a lid on sectarian violence, especially in Baghdad.  This means clamping down on militias in both Sunni and Shia neighborhoods.  So far, anti-occupation Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has played his hand well by ordering his militia, the Mahdi Army, to stand down.  He is simply following one of Mao's rules of guerilla war: when the enemy advances, retreat.  He knows the surge can't last forever (it's stretching the U.S. Army to the breaking point).  Once the extra combat brigades go home in a year or so, his Mahdi Army will reemerge to rule large chunks of Baghdad again.

2) Pressuring Iraq's parliament to ratify the all-important oil law, which will hand foreign oil companies control of Iraq's most precious resource and huge profits!  (A barrel of Iraqi oil costs only $1 to extract and world oil prices hover around $50-$60.  Do the math.)  With dozens of American "advisers" attached to government ministries, the largest embassy in the world in Baghdad, and 140,000 troops in Iraq, guess who will get the lion's share of this windfall?

3) Push the Iraqi government to reverse de-Baathification (or as I like to call it, re-Baathification).  Early on in the occupation, the U.S. dictator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, decreed that the entire Iraqi state and Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party abolished.  This meant not only the destruction of the armed forces, the police, and the secret police, but of every government institution as well.  Everyone working for the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education, and in municipal services like garbage collection was fired with a stroke of Bremer's pen.  Many Iraqi soldiers, fired from their jobs and unable to collect any kind of stipend or pension, joined the armed resistance.

In the four years since the invasion, the Sunni community has been at the forefront of this resistance.  The Bush administration hopes to co-opt part of this resistance by giving them a seat at the government table.  Once that happens, the U.S. and its Iraqi collaborators would smash the remaining "hard-liners" who didn't go for the deal.  (It should be noted that goals #1 and #3 are closely connected.  The Bush administration thinks that the cycle of violence between Sunni and Shia is what is preventing the creation of a stable pro-U.S. government with a significant social base in all three of Iraq's major ethnic/religious groups.)

4) Rolling back Iran's influence in Iraq.  Within a day of Bush's surge speech back in January, U.S. forces detained five Iranian diplomats in Iraq.  A few weeks afterward, the administration put out its latest barrage of lies, claiming that Iran supplied mines and bombs responsible for the deaths of over 150 U.S. troops.

President Bush says "we're beginning to see some signs of progress."  He claimed that "those on the ground are seeing some hopeful signs."  By "those on the ground" he must've meant Republican Senator-turned-crackpot John McCain, who claimed that he could "go for a stroll" in certain Baghdad neighborhoods as proof that the surge is working.  He even claimed that General Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, travels around Iraq in an unarmed humvee, provoking "laughter down the line" from military officials.

It's unclear what progress Bush and McCain are talking about, especially when we compare the goals listed above with the results:

1) Violence has increased significantly and sectarian violence has spread outside Baghdad. 1,869 Iraqi bystanders were killed in March while 1,646 were killed in February; 165 Iraqi policemen were killed in March while 131 were killed in February; and 44 Iraqi soldiers were killed in March while 29 were killed in February.  Sectarian attacks within Baghdad are down a little (huge car bombs still go off in Shia neighborhoods), but they have spread elsewhere in the country.  They've spread south to Basra between rival Shia militias, and to the north to Tal Afar between Shia and Sunni and to Kurdistan between Arabs and Kurds (who are both Sunni, by the way) where the government recently decided to forcibly displace the Arabs living there and replace them with Kurds, a 180-degree reversal of Saddam Hussein's policy of Arabizing Kurdistan.

Deploying more troops has made Iraq more bloody, more dangerous, and all-out civil war across the entire country more likely as academic and Iraq expert Michael Schwartz predicted back in January in his brilliant article "The Myth of More."  Rather than smothering the smoldering civil war, Bush's surge has kicked its embers in Baghdad all over the country, spreading the fire.

2) There's no word on whether or not the law will pass soon.  Many of the parties, even stooges like Iyad Allawi oppose the law or collaborators like the Kurds have major reservations about ending state control of Iraq's most important resource by privatizing it.  After all, what's the point of being an unprincipled collaborator and weaseling your way into the government if that government doesn't control the country's only valuable resource?  My best guess is that it will pass after a lot of stalling and with some modification.

3) The most powerful Shia cleric in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, has come out strongly against re-Ba'athification. Although he is not openly involved in politics, it is well known that his voice carries a lot of weight with the Shia parties in Iraq's government, specifically the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Dawa parties.  There is also opposition among the Kurdish parties, and I'm sure Moqtada al-Sadr would not be happy if his family's executioners or their associates joined the government.

4) Iran still has a lot of influence in Iraq.  The parties that collaborated with the occupation to get a hold of political power are all friendly to Iran (many of their leaders waited out Saddam Hussein's rule in exile in Iran).  Essentially, Iran is winning the war in Iraq.  Sending 20,000 more troops hasn't changed the fact that pro-Iranian parties control the Iraqi government, and the U.S. can't just get rid of them either because no one else in Iraq will collaborate with the occupation.  The U.S. needs them to stay in Iraq more than they need the U.S. to stay in power.

The amount of control and influence the U.S. has over Iraq is directly proportional to the number of troops it has on the ground there.  During the surge, the U.S. will have more influence than before; if the U.S. "redeploys" combat troops out of Iraq, U.S. influence will decrease.  By contrast, Iran has zero troops in Iraq and commands great influence.  Furthermore, Iran's economic ties to Iraq are deepening every day.

The U.S. is stuck with this problem, short of outlawing SCIRI and Dawa, turning on the Kurds, and installing a Saddam Hussein-like Sunni dictator to start gassing people again.  That would mean open confrontation with about 80% of Iraq's population and it would require a lot of Sunnis to forget about U.S. atrocities in Tal Afar and Fallujah against them.  It's a non-starter.

So the bottom line is: the surge has failed and it isn't even half way over yet.