According to Lieutenant General Odierno, the "surge" has paid dividends: 17,946 insurgents detained, 3,180 killed, and 1,016 wounded since January. But it has come at a high cost in American lives.

The new strategy under General David Petraeus has left US forces more exposed and led to third bloodiest month since the start of the war, says the CS Monitor. There were 110 confirmed American deaths in the month of May.

Further, most of the violence is in and around Baghdad, where sectarian tensions run high. That makes "political reconciliation" difficult, and the violence won't decrease until that happens, according to Odierno.

"I will not be too optimistic, I will wait and see; I've been here too long to be too optimistic about anything we've moved forward with," said Odierno.

Michael O'Hanlon, an analyst at Washington DC think-tank the Brooking's Institution, says that the current level of violence continues over the summer, then the "surge" would have to be judged as "ultimately futile."

Excerpts follow:

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[O'Hanlon] "It is possible that you could have progress and not see US fatality rates go down for awhile, but I think it's relatively hard to imagine that we would start losing 100 people a month for the summer and be able to term this strategy successful."

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The final elements of the surge of US forces announced in January are arriving in Iraq over the next week or so. Odierno will provide his assessment of progress in Iraq come August. In turn, General Petraeus, his boss, will provide an overall assessment to President Bush, Congress and the American public come September. But Odierno cautioned that it's likely that his assessment could well say that he needs more time to truly make a determination about progress in Iraq.

That sounds about right to T.X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel and an expert on counterinsurgencies who said the violence was to be expected. He sees the effort as a long-term one that even now won't offer up any overnight solutions. "People shouldn't be looking for an answer by September," he says. "Counterinsurgencies are a decades-long progress."

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READ THE FULL CS MONITOR PIECE HERE 


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