Some folks will tell you that things aren’t getting better in Iraq, based on the Brookings survey. You can find this opinion on Kevin Drum’s lefty blog, and in a story he cites in the New York Times. The essence of the claim is that things are actually getting worse because the Army has revised its estimate of enemy combatants to 20,000 from 5,000. This doesn’t actually mean, of course, that 15,000 new combatants have entered the fray, just that the estimate (which was pulled out of somebody’s ass to begin with) has been adjusted. But rather than trying to wade through Kevin’s spin, why not just go to the Brookings web site and see the actual report? It’s not that hard to understand. Here’s one of the graphs that should be of some interest:
Now I’m not nearly as clever as Kevin Drum, but to me it does appear that things are getting better for our boys, and frankly that’s the only metric of much interest to me at this point.
your comments that iraq is getting better don’t seem to jive with the graph. between june and july, after we “handed over” iraq, the casualties increased by more than 100. perhaps you simply liked the way that dip at the end looked. you may not have noticed that last point was as of august 11, less than half way throught the month. we’re on track for another bad month in iraq.
Wrong-o, little dude. The casualties peaked in May, the month before the handoff, and they’ve been down in June, July, and August.