Media ignoring its own metrics in Iraq

Dean Barnett:

MOST PEOPLE DON'T know about the website Icasualties.org. Icasualties.org is run by a bunch of lefties who have dedicated themselves to aggregating all the bad news out of Iraq over the past few years. Each day for the past thirty-four months, Icasualties.org has documented every Coalition military death as well as every violent civilian death in Iraq.

The people who run Icasualties.org obviously have little fondness for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Among their many tendentious metrics is a tally of all the deaths since President Bush announced "Bring them on." Yet, in spite of a clear political agenda, Icaualties.org plays it straight--they just report the numbers. It's important to note that all the discussion regarding how David Petraeus classifies deaths has nothing to do with Icasualties.org's figures. If six bodies are found in Baghdad, they get added to Icasualties.org's butcher's bill. David Petraeus doesn't get a vote.

Since Icasualties.org is an ideological fellow traveler of most mainstream media outlets, you'd figure the site's reporting would occasionally get noticed. In the past, Icasualties.org's numbers and mainstream media reports have sometimes marched in lockstep. Who can forget all the "grim milestones" that the media purportedly mourned during the past four years?

IN THE LAST FEW MONTHS, the story in Iraq has changed dramatically. The numbers on Icasualties.org have reflected that change....

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The results of the surge, or "the escalation" as Harry Reid derisively called it, have been obvious in the Icasualties.org numbers. Before the surge, a bad month would claim the lives of roughly 3,000 Iraqi civilians and security force members. In February '07, the exact number was 3,014 Iraqi casualties. In March, the figure was 2,977. As the surge began to have its effects, that number dropped to 1674 in August. In September, with the surge taking full effect, the numbers showed a profound change--the Iraqi death toll plunged to 848.

Happily, September's figures don't appear to be an aberration. October has seen 502 Iraqi casualties so far. If the trend continues though the end of October, the final number should be around 650 for the entire month. That represents better than an 80 percent improvement from the war's nadir.

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Those who are invested in our defeat in Iraq are choosing to ignore the evidence to the contrary, but it is not going away. The defeat of al Qaeda is have a cascading effect on that organization in Iraq and is also freeing up troops to deal with the Iranian supported groups. This will also have a cascading effect on the violence metric which as I have pointed out before is a lagging indicator of the success of the surge.