“Will 5,000 American deaths be enough?” thundered Bob Herbert of the New York Times (06/26/06).  “Ten thousand?  The killing continued unabated last week.  Iraq is a sinkhole of destruction….”

Well, one half of 2006 has passed, and Bob Herbert is wrong.  Whether one assesses U.S. casualties, Iraqi civilian casualties, or casualties among the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), the killing has abated.  Taken as a whole, the pattern of violence in Iraq reflects an insurgency that is unable to defeat American troops, unable to defeat Iraqi troops, and barely able to maintain terror against unarmed civilians.

The statistics in the following analysis follow those of the site “Iraq Coalition Casualty Count”.

We use this site despite its vehement anti-Iraq War agenda. Its programmers maintain the most comprehensive data-base of casualty statistics we’ve encountered, as reported by both official sources and by the world press.

Fewer U.S. troop deaths

Finding:  Extrapolating for the entire year, total U.S. troop deaths in 2006 have declined 16% compared to 2005.

We have lost 355 soldiers and marines this year in combat – a rate just under two per day.  The fatality rate has declined for two years now.

 

Fewer U.S. troop casualties

Finding:  Extrapolating for the entire year, total U.S. casualties in 2006 – deaths plus wounded-in-action – have declined 19% from their 2005 level, and 38% from their 2004 level.

Total U.S. casualties were 8840 in 2004.  They declined to 6792 in 2005.  Over the first half of 2006, the Department of Defense has reported 2,369 casualties.  However, the June figures for wounded-in-action are obviously underreported.  (They will be updated the later in July.)  So to avoid over-reporting coalition progress, we have extrapolated casualties figures for 2006 using the January-through-May figures as representing 5/12ths of the year. 

Fewer Iraq Security Force casualties

Finding: Extrapolating for the entire year, IDF fatalities in 2006 – Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police – are down 19.4% from their from their 2005 level.

When critics of the Iraq war acknowledge the steep decline in U.S. casualties, they temper that admission with an accusation:  that the composition of the casualties has merely shifted from Americans to Iraqis.  But this is untrue.  There were 2545 IDF deaths in 2005.  In the first half of 2006, there were 1025 IDF deaths – 2050, if one extrapolated this rate for the entire year.

The killing of Iraqi police and soldiers peaked in the summer of 2005.  In June, July and August of that year, the IDF lost nearly 300 personnel killed per month.  Since then, IDF casualties have trended sharply downward.  The police and army combined lost 150 in May, 134 in June.

Finding: Weighting IDF fatalities in 2005 and 2006 to reflect the actual size of the forces involved, the rate of  IDF fatalities declined by 43%.

The force that lost 2545 in 2005 was, on average, 29% smaller than the built-up IDF of 2006.  Weighting IDF losses for relative force sizes, the IDF casualty rate has declined strikingly this year.

Fewer Iraqi Civilian Deaths

Finding: Civilian casualties (according to icasualties.org) peaked at 1,524 in August of 2005, during the second Battle for Fallujah.  They have declined since then, but not consistently. In June of 2006, there were 734 reported civilian casualties.
From the August 2005 peak, non-combatant violent deaths in Iraq declined steadily, to 344 in December.  But following the bombing of the Askari Shrine in February of 2006, civilian deaths spiked amidst a flurry of sectarian violence.   These deaths were concentrated in Baghdad and its immediate environs.

As the insurgency retreated from confrontations with U.S. forces, then from confrontation with forces of the Iraqi democracy, its leaders chose “soft” targets – i.e., unarmed civilians.  Al Qaeda announced the shift in strategy in fall of 2005.  But “spectacular” attacks on Shi’ite civilians, and the revenge killings that ensued, didn’t ramp up until the Feb. 22, 2006 bombing of the Golden Shine, a Shi’ite holy site in the Sunni-dominated town of Samarra.

In March, April, and May of ‘06, civilian casualties averaged 893 per month. This level of fatalities didn’t approach the death toll of summer, 2005, when the insurgents were challenging the coalition for territory. But it represented a considerable worsening of the civilian fatality levels of late 2005. 

In June of 2006, the coalition killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then dismantled much of his network in a series of lightning raids.  The impact was felt almost immediately. Civilian fatalities declined in June (according to icasualties.org) by 18%. 

This reduced death toll mirrors the June decline in attacks reported by Iraqi authorities.

Summary

Surveying the struggle for Iraq through the casualty numbers, one beholds an insurgency in decline.  Today, the anti-democracy forces in Iraq are unable to confront the Americans; unable to confront the Iraqi Security Forces; and unable to maintain a consistent level of terror even against “soft” targets – i.e., women in marketplaces, children on school buses, etc. 

The casualty figures of 2006 directly contradict the Bob Herbert’s assertion that Iraq is a “sinkhole of destruction” and the site of “unabated killing.” But then, the New York Times doesn’t report the numbers.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 3rd, 2006 at 11:47 am and is filed under MSM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.