We're Winning

U.S. combat deaths, and Iraqi civilian deaths down, (but lets not get too excited about the civilian deaths, the iraqis stopped providing data to the red cross for independent verifaction and guess what month they stopped doing that.)

You could look at the the decrease of the combat deaths and say that the surge was working. It is, in a sense, in the sense that General Shinseki was right, we need a quarter million troops in iraq, a number much larger than the one we have now. Not that 250,000 would do the job, but we could perform 'force protection', some small effects of which you are seeing now. We are 'flooding the zone' if you will. It would be easy to look at this and see that we are reducing the violence and maybe things were going to get better. But that would disregard combat dynamics. The insurgents are laying low right now. They are having a hard time hitting their targets of opportunity, but that is temporary. The deaths will creep up steadily as the environment adjusts to the larger numbers of troops. The situation is a fluid one. We know what will happen because it happened every time we have increased the troops before. The momentum is ours, during and shortly, after the increases and then the insurgents find they actually have more targets.

We will start to see Bush and his minions crowing about the reduction in deaths. They will be proud as peacocks that only 2.7 Americans are dying each day, instead of 3.6. I am sure it will bring some solace to them. The Army is rapidly moving past the point at which it can adequately recover from all these years of combat and still be effective in the next decade. I hate to sound like Eeyore, but its maddening to me to realize the that jackass Tony Snow is going to be beating his chest and crowing about how only 2.7 Americans died today. Whoopdeefuckingdoo.