{"id":2820,"date":"2004-08-10T17:37:33","date_gmt":"2004-08-11T00:37:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2004\/08\/things-are-getting-better-in-iraq\/"},"modified":"2004-08-10T17:37:33","modified_gmt":"2004-08-11T00:37:33","slug":"things-are-getting-better-in-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2004\/08\/10\/things-are-getting-better-in-iraq\/","title":{"rendered":"Things are getting better in Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tSome 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<\/a>, and in a story he cites in the New York Times.<\/a> 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?<\/a> It’s not that hard to understand. Here’s one of the graphs that should be of some interest:<\/p>\n

\"Injuries\" <\/p>\n

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.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Things are getting better in Iraq”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-Ju","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2820\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}