The Opinionated Bastard

I really haven’t been motivated to blog lately.

Part of it is because I’m two months into a 3 month extended business trip. So I’m not at home, blogging isn’t comfortable, I have a new job with lots to do, my last job screwed me on vacation pay, yadda, yadda, yadda.

But mostly, its because its just a waste. I’ve reviewed the numbers.

Is Iraq better or worse then it was the last time I blogged?

Worse.

Is it as terrible as the media portrays?

No.

Have we “lost the war”?

No.

So what’s bugging me is that no doubt many of the people who keep stupidly hoping that we’ll lose the war to “teach Bush a lesson” will take my posting this as a rallying cry. See! We told you!

Yeah, well fuck you. You’re a moron if you think that “Bush should be taught a lesson” at America’s expense.

Oh well, on to the analysis.

Here’s my famous chart (click to popup):

So what is this telling me?

IED deaths are pretty much steady state.

What’s more disturbing is the trend in deaths from hostile fire (bullets in the chart).

Our soldiers are mixing it up more directly with the Iraqis these days. Now I last posted about the war in April (about March, because you can’t post about a month until its over, duh). That seemed to be a low point in casualties and perhaps a high point in our conduct of the war. Kind of interesting really, because it was a low point for casualties in 2005 as well. Could the weather have more of an effect on the war then our desires and wishes in Iraq? One wonders.

Showing the total killed each month shows that while the war is worse then March it’s not really any worse then its been in the past:

September was 8th out of 21 months.

The number of wounded sort of bears out my theory that the soldiers doing more fighting (based on the assumption that IEDs tend to kill or miss entirely so woundings rise when our troops are doing more direct fighting) :

So September has the highest number of wounded in Jan 2005, but only 8th for soldiers killed.

The real sign that things have turned for the worse though is that the Pentagon started increasing the number of troops in Iraq starting in July after they’d been slowly drawing them down:

Meanwhile, the number of Iraqi troops has been steadily increasing as well:

At this point, Iraqi troops outnumber US troops by over 2 to 1:

Meanwhile, one bright point, September had the 3rd fewest number of Iraqi policemen killed.

So what does it all mean?

Basically, I’m not seeing a huge amount of progress in Iraq. Whatever progress we’re making in Iraq is glacial. We seemed to be making steady progress until about July, but as the Iraqis squabbled in the legislature instead of knuckling down and working out their problems, things began to deteriorate.

The Pentagon’s answer to this implies that basically, its not our job to fix Iraq, its the Iraqis:

The Iraqi’s agree:

They also think Al Qaeda/Bin Laden is a putz:

So what I’m thinking at this point is the following:

Iraq is never going to be as peaceful as the white bread suburban neighborhoods most of you live in. If its as peaceful as say, Compton, Iraq will have been a success. That would be 1563 deaths a month in Iraq given the relative sizes of Compton and Iraq. (Yes, I’m making the analogy between urban gang related violence in Los Angeles, and well, urban “militia related” violence in Baghdad. Deal with it.) So if you’re expecting Iraq to ever be bunny rabbits and flowers, its not going to happen. This past year, Iraq has gone from 1.07 Comptons to a high of 2.18 Comptons in July, dropping to 1.86 Comptons in August. That sucks. It sucks for the Iraqis most of all.

But the media can’t have it both ways. Either Compton and Iraq are both in a state of civil war, or neither are. So all the yelling and screaming about Iraq being in a civil war in the media is well, election crap. They’re in something, “civil insurrection” or just “chaos”, or “random violence” perhaps, but not “civil war”.

Meanwhile, I’m disappointed with the lack of progress in Iraq. While I’m somewhat disappointed in our government, I’m mostly disappointed in the Iraqis.

Yet its not entirely their fault. If Bush has made any mistake in Iraq, I think it was how they conducted the elections in the first place. As someone put it, they didn’t have an election, they had a poll.

The proverb goes “all politics is local”. When it comes down to it, people vote and care about the things that most directly affect them. I’m guessing here, but I think that we structured the elections the way we did because we were worried about corruption. I have to wonder if we wouldn’t have done better with an Iraqi legislature full of Chicago Aldermen willing to deal in order to get the trash picked up on their street instead of the collection of party hacks we have now. That is, we have party stalwarts when we need people who are willing to deal with each other.

As for whether we should have gone into Iraq in the first place, its still too soon to tell. Saddam may not have gotten along with Al Queda, but he got along quite well with a number of terrorist organizations (he issued press releases!). He may not have had an “arsenal of WMD”, but he was definitely playing around with the idea. If we pull it off, it was a great decision. If we don’t, well then, I ask the critics what should we have done instead? If the Democrats want to criticize, then they need the alternative to “we should have sat on our thumbs”.

Meanwhile here’s some perspective:

Animated History of the Middle East