Thursday, July 31, 2008
Victory watch: The longest stretch without an American KIA
There have been only five American KIA in Iraq since June 26 (excluding one poor soldier who died on July 2 from injuries incurred in 2005). No American soldier has died in combat since July 15, the longest such period since the invasion. Recorded deaths of Iraqi civilians were at their lowest level since April 2005, notwithstanding a spate of female suicide bombings in the last week of the month. Still too high, but let's put it in perspective. If you annualize the 305 civilians who died in July and divide it into Iraq's population of 27.5 million, you get 0.00013. In July, at least, an Iraqi's risk of death from homicide was only 16% higher than in the United States during the first year of the Clinton administration. Now, you can take such thinking too far; the Iraqi statistics probably understate homicide because they are based on press accounts, and there is a big psychological difference between garden-variety homicide and deaths from bombing. But that does not make the improvement any less impressive.
[Time stamp corrected]
8 Comments:
By 
Marlin, at
Thu Jul 31, 01:43:00 PM:
Iraq Coalition Casualties catergorized the July 2 death incorrectly. This individual actually died in 2007, not 2008.
By 
, at
Thu Jul 31, 02:30:00 PM:
Never one with that rare ability to gamble the rest of my life on one step or anything spewing from a conservative's maw, I must say that every time Mickey opens his mouth admiration walks out the door, held open by vain stupidity.
I would sincerely like him to embrace notions of Deep Play, leavened with the instant rice of social convention, yet find my self stranded, gape-mouthed, eyes akimbo, staring goose-like at that big rock candy mountain vanilla dollop of existential grab-assing he engages in with business partners/nankers cut from a cloth both tattered and mollusk scented.
Some where out there run the gazelles of his idealistic youth, stomachs swollen as they are with the earnest anticipation of even fouler digestive volition, as he admits to himself, as if anybody ever cared, of his complicity, yeah, his cowardice in the face of candy-assed home field GOP advantage.
All this because he dreams of eating sandwiches on the train, sax bellowing in intense, ad-hoc, race horse piss-off meanderings, intergalactic sausages wrapped around the vertical column of the same, as he defies the extra gravity of the situation, desperate to recycle, along with the fish, chickens, and vegetables he grew up with, admixtures and there waste products.
By , at
Thu Jul 31, 02:42:00 PM:
Carl, I bet you're looking forward to a favorable ruling on the under 100 gram holding of weed, aren't you.
Oh, and your drivel bores me, unless you tell me you're really Chambers, in which case I'll admit to my amusement.
By Purple Avenger, at
Thu Jul 31, 03:23:00 PM:
Losing one's sanity is a terrible thing
By , at
Thu Jul 31, 11:59:00 PM:
Carl:
I have no idea what you;'re talking about, so here's a picture of Islamic Rage Boy with a pancake on his head.
By , at
Fri Aug 01, 10:53:00 AM:
Thanks for reporting on something the MSM has ignored, that we are winning in Iraq. Besides the obvious benefit that winning a war is preferable to losing one, our impending victory has driven many on the left quite mad.
By Georg Felis, at
Fri Aug 01, 11:15:00 AM:
*ignores Carl*
Victory in Iraq cannot be defined as concretely as “And then they lived happily ever after, The End”, it will be an ongoing process that surges ahead, has setbacks, and surges forward again. Heck, just look at Democracy in the US, we’ve had setbacks, civil wars, our capitol district has the highest murder rate in the country, and our legislature is paralyzed with incompetent leaders who could not make a courageous decision if their lives depended on it. Democracy is not pretty, we bicker and fight over the most petty of things. In this regard and more, Iraq is already far above us. How many of our courageous representatives of both parties would actually show up for work if the statehouse were subject to random bombings and mortar attacks? Darned few, I’d guess.
Bush has understood from the start that this will be a long struggle, and in the end it will be the Iraqi people who will make the decision to take command of their own destiny, or to cower in fear of the tyrants and murderers who have no problems using the tools of murder and terror to maintain their power. Democracy is not easy, it is a constant fight to rise over mankind’s baser instincts of “might makes right” and put the needs of the weak above the powerful.
May God defend their efforts, and may they ultimately triumph to bring an era of peace and prosperity to that war-torn land.
By Noumenon, at
Thu Aug 07, 10:10:00 AM:
Hey, tigerhawk, thanks for this post. I actually couldn't find this information. It seemed wrong to rejoice too much over our soldiers not dying and not care if the civilians were still dying. But I didn't want to point that out and make you think I was trying to shift the debate to civilian casualties. So thanks for caring about it on your own.
