The Opinionated Bastard

Well, a week has gone by so its time to look at the latest brookings report and numbers from icasualties.org.

As I said before, fatalities in August are going to be higher then in previous months. The Brookings report has them at 65 so far. Breaking the fatalities out by week we can see that even without August 4th when 20 soldiers got killed in two separate attacks, the weeks have been pretty heavy.

So even before the week of the 4th, we were getting about 12 fatalties/week in Iraq. Though its also obvious that there are good weeks and bad weeks.

Something you can tell from looking at the press releases that you can't tell from these numbers is that no longer are the biggest chunk of the fatalities coming from the Haditha area. So perhaps that Operation Quick Strike worked, the intent was to push the insurgents out. They've tried that before of course, but this time they pushed in multiple areas so the insurgents would have nowhere to run to.

The wounded number is always a bit less volatile, it shows the number of servicemen wounded as 364 about halfway through the month. So August will probably show a peak there was well, though it has slowed down quite a bit lately.

Interestingly enough, attacks on Iraqi Policemen have slowed down quite a bit. It's too soon to tell, but August may show a slight decline in IP deaths since January. Similarly, Iraqi civilian deaths and car bomb attacks are lower then I would have expected.

So basically, if the US goes rooting after the insurgents, the low-key civil war that is going on in Iraq slows down, but our casualties go up as the terrorists move from shooting at the civilians and police to shooting at us. Attacks on oil and gas infrastructure are way down as well.

Every month, about 3,000 more Irai Police go on duty, though it will take about 10 more months before there are more Iraqis then US soldiers in Iraq; there are about 98,000 on duty now.

Electricity is not quite as good as July, but much better then it has been in the past, which is good. We're going on 3 months now with more electricity available then there was before the war. The problem is though that the Iraqis are doing better then they were under Saddam, so they all have more toys nows...

So overall, I would say that Iraq is better for the Iraqis, slightly worse for our troops at the moment.