The Opinionated Bastard

So here's the latest chart (all charts “popup”):

So are things getting worse in Iraq or better? That's the question I keep asking myself, and why I keep reviewing the Iraq Index report from the Brookings Institution.

October was always going to be a tough month. There was increased activity by US forces in clearing out Anbar province, and there was going to be increased activity from the insurgents because of the elections.

So let's look at the graph. A huge jump up in IED deaths this month. Most of them were in the last few days of the month, but still quite a big jump. IED deaths have been trending upwards for awhile now, but I see this as a losing strategy for the insurgents. You can't hold territory with mines.

Meanwhile, although all the other numbers were higher than September, many of them are lower than past months. A big chunk of the deaths this month were from car crashes and other non-hostile causes; this happens whenever there is a troop rotation in Iraq. The hostile file number I find especially interesting as typically when the Coalition is very active, this number rises. In both September and October, this number was lower than expected. So I'm thinking that perhaps the operations of August and September were effective enough to drop the deaths from hostile fire to a lower level.

So in context, all these numbers are lower than I expected, except for IED deaths. Woundings, which I use to indicate the operational tempo of the troops are holding steady, so even though deaths are high this month (92) perhaps that's just luck, or the fact that the Baghdad troops have less experience with IEDs than the Anbar province troops.

Now this is interesting. The number of Iraqi military and police killed keeps falling:

Now realize that there are now many more IP then there used to be, which means that being an Iraqi Policeman is getting dramatically less dangerous even faster then that graph indicates. So day-to-day security may be improving dramatically in Iraq. The next graph kind of hints towards that:

According to this graph, things have been dramatically improving for the Iraqis since August.

In polling, Iraqi's are a little more optimistic:

So bottom line, better or worse?

Hard to say. Getting the constitution passed was definitely a milestone. There are now enough IP on duty that coalition forces are starting to take territory and turn it over to the IP, so that's a big milestone. In fact, I expect we'll be leaving in August 2006. They'll be having a bunch of political campaigning leading up to the December 15th elections, and while that stirs up the insurgents, it calms down the population as they get involved in the political process. The Iraqis themselves are more optimistic, even before the constitution passed they said so in polls. Electricity was down slightly this month, but demand is down more as it gets cooler in Iraq.

So better, slightly. Lots more work to do.

Meanwhile I found yet another report to look at, this one from the Pentagon. You can download it from here.

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