![](”http://static.flickr.com/44/116364022_14e11279b9_o.jpg")
Thursday, 6 Apr 2006
After all, the numbers tell the story (H/T Gatewaypundit ):
81, 76, 50, 49, 43, 25
What are these numbers? This week’s
Powerball winners? A safe deposit combo? New numbers to torment those
poor b*stards stranded on the island in Lost?No, they’re the number of troops that have died in hostile actions in Iraq
for each of the past six months. That last number represents the lowest
level of troop deaths in a year, and second-lowest in two years.But
it must be that the insurgency is turning their assault on Iraqi
military and police, who are increasingly taking up the slack, right?215, 176, 193, 189, 158, 193 (and the three months before that were 304, 282, 233)
Okay, okay, so insurgents aren’t engaging us; they’re turning increasingly to car bombs then, right?
70, 70, 70, 68, 30, 30
Civilians then. They’re just garroting poor civilians.
527, 826, 532, 732, 950, 446 (upper bound, two months before that were 2489 and 1129).
My
point here is not that everything is peachy in Iraq. It isn’t. My point
isn’t that the insurgency is in its last throes. It isn’t. My point
here isn’t even to argue that we’re winning. I’m at best
cautiously-pessimistic-to-neutral about how things are going there.My
only point is that, at the very least, people who complain that good
news coming out of Iraq gets shuttered by the press aren’t crazy. I’m a
regular denizen of the right-leaning blogosphere (though I spend about
half my daily routine with left-leaning sites), and I was unequivicolly
shocked when I saw this. Completely the
opposite of what I’d expected. My non-scientific sample of three
friends, all of whom are considerably more bullish about the prospects
in Iraq than I am, revealed three people similarly surprised by these
numbers. I’m guessing if I polled people on this site regarding the
direction those numbers were going, and people didn’t answer
strategically (eg figure I was up to something from the question
words), no one would predict any of those numbers were on a downward
trend, or were even flat.
Things are falling apart, everything is getting worse by the second, withdraw the troops now, wahhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Mommy, hide me under the bed!
April 6th, 2006 at 11:09 am
‘Things Are Terribly Bad In Iraq And Getting Worse’ - Really?
Even Chicken Little would be disgusted with the distortions and blind eye to truth by the Left and the MSM!
April 6th, 2006 at 11:58 am
I’m still puzzling over that BBC poll done last November that showed 64% (something like that) of Iraqis described their lives as either “good” or “very good” while at the very same time, 98.4% of Iraqi bloggers claimed they lived in hell. Something isn’t right. Even the most optimistic of the Iraqi bloggers I know of (Sunshine and her Mama) seem to be losing hope. Maybe Iraqi bloggers are not a representative cross-section of Iraq?
About the casualty numbers… I don’t want to be cavalier about troop casualties, but you wouldn’t have to dig very deep in US military history to find single battles where the US lost more troops than have been lost in Afghanistan and Iraq both, in 4 years.
All that said, I’m still not feeling very good about Iraq’s prospects for the future. Maybe the media and the bloggers are getting to me too. I just don’t see much to be hopeful about. Yeah, the people keep coming out in huge numbers to vote, but they keep voting for idiots. The one good thing I’ve heard of is that Iraqis seem to be a lot less tolerant of foreign terrorists come to Iraq to commit murder and mayhem than they have been in the past. That truly is a good thing, and it’s a dmaned shame it took this long.
April 6th, 2006 at 1:24 pm
What does seem to be happening is that there is less violence outside Baghdad and more in Baghdad, where it is more likely to be reported. Also, after three years of it, many Iraqis are getting very frayed at the edges.
April 6th, 2006 at 10:42 pm
Did anyone else see the 3 guys trying to plant a roadside bomb get zapped by a hellfire missile on FOX yesterday? What a beautiful sight. I bring this up because the MSM never shows our successes over there. And their reason is that’s too dangerous. This video came from a reporter in DC, however. I must also say my brother-in-law is a liberal reporter in Bagdhad for ABC. And I pray he will come home safe, but he does most of his reports from a Bagdhad hotel.
April 7th, 2006 at 7:54 am
New numbers to torment those poor b*stards stranded on the island in Lost?
LMAO!!!! That’s hillarious!
April 7th, 2006 at 8:35 am
From the Brookings Institution report p. 10:
“NOTE ON IRAQI CIVILIANS KILLED TABLE: Numbers for the current month are typically incomplete through the next month as the database continues to be updated.”
Therefore, the March number for civilians killed is preliminary. We won’t until the end of April if the three month trend of increasing violence towards civilians has stopped.