Casualties in Iraq for the Month of August

Civilian casualties in Iraq for the month of August were nearly identical to the level seen in July. I was surprised by this because the month started off with suicide bombings by al Qaeda that killed 70 people. Another suicide attack a little later in the month killed at least 400 people in the worst terrorist attack since the invasion in 2003. Given those attacks, I had thought that August would be worst month ever for overall civilian casualties; just in time for the highly anticipated report that will be delivered by General Petraeus mere days from now. Fortunately, that is not how it turned out.

Here is what civilian casualties looked like for August compared to previous months (using my usual method and source, detailed here):


The August figure includes the discovery of 60 corpses in Baquba, which may have been a false report, but the overall story does not change much whether those deaths are included or not. If you include them, casualties ticked up slightly in August, but the basic story is that July and August were much the same in terms of the overall number killed. The dark purple bars show the 7 months prior June. This was a period during which casualties were high and stable and during which extra U.S. troops were flowing into Iraq. The average number of civilians killed per month over that period was about 1660. The three blue bars show the months during which the troop surge has been operational. Casualties dropped substantially in the first month but were higher in the next two months (but were still below the levels seen in the preceding 7-month period). The average number of civilian casualties during the 3 troop-surge months was 1356. Thus, while casualties remain unacceptably high, we can probably say that in the absence of the troop surge, an extra 300 Iraqi civilians would have been killed per month.

These saved Iraqi lives do not seem to have come at the expense of more U.S. soldiers being killed, as the next chart shows:


Although I wish more progress were evident in the civilian casualty chart, one has to say that the new strategy adopted by General Petraeus is showing results. Actually, the results have been quite spectacular, but this fact is obscured by the high number of civilian casualties that are still evident. I have thought all along that if civilian casualties did not drop very substantially by the Fall "deadline," Harry Reid would use that fact to successfully convince the American public that "this war is lost." And because most Americans do not pay close attention to the details and therefore do not really understand what is happening in Iraq, I had thought that surrender (to al Qaeda) would be in the cards.

I don't think that any more. In fact, I am amazed that Americans (and even some Democratic leaders) are able to appreciate the momentous turn of events that has occurred in Iraq lately. More and more Americans seem to understand that we really are in a war against al Qaeda in Iraq (whether or not Iraqi politicians reconcile with each other), that al Qaeda has made it so, and that losing to al Qaeda would have profoundly negative consequences. They also seem to appreciate that the tide has turned against al Qaeda in a very big way even though the terrorists remain capable of launching sneak attacks against and slaughtering unarmed and completely innocent men, women and children. Although the mainstream media often refers to these attacks as being carried out by Sunni "militants" or "extremists," the American public seems to appreciate the glaringly obvious fact that these attacks are instead carried out by "terrorists." Al Qaeda terrorists, in fact. They are doing so not because they are participating in a Sunni-vs.-Shiite civil war but because they are trying to provoke a civil war to bring down the Iraqi government and to demoralize you (so that you will throw your support behind Harry Reid and like-minded anti-victory Democrats).

I have long pointed to the eerie code of silence that Democrats have adopted on the subject of al Qaeda in Iraq. On those rare occasions when they do happen to mention al Qaeda in Iraq, they typically deny its importance and point to the absurd notion that the real terrorists are in Afghanistan. You know that this is false. All you have to do is add up the number of civilians killed by foreign suicide bombers in Iraq this year and compare it to the number killed by suicide bombers in Afghanistan over the same period of time. It would be something like 2000 (Iraq) vs. 60 (Afghanistan) in 2007 alone. Obviously, al Qaeda's leaders are hiding somewhere along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but they are sending their foot soldiers to Iraq to evict American forces from that country first. Then they'll turn their attention to Afghanistan (at which point the Democrats will finally be right about where the real terrorists are).

For now, the political strategy adopted by the Democrats is clear. As they see it, the way to engineer defeat at the hands of al Qaeda is to continue to ignore the fact that we are in a war against that terrorist organization (and that we are making great progress in that war) and to instead focus solely on the lack of political progress among Iraqi politicians. Democratic Senator Richard Durbin briefly deviated from this intentionally misleading script when, in a moment of unguarded honesty, he acknowledged that the troop surge is achieving military progress against al Qaeda in Iraq. Now, however, he is reverting to form and working hard to focus attention away from al Qaeda (the real issue and the real enemy) and back on to the lack of political progress:

“What we’re hearing is a pretty consistent message of failure on the political front in Iraq,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, a Democrat, who visited Iraq in August.

In a telephone interview from Iowa on Friday, where he was campaigning for Senator Barack Obama, Mr. Durbin said the White House had distorted remarks made upon his return in which he noted an improvement in security following the increase in American troops to more than 160,000.

This has it exactly backwards. The main issue is our war against al Qaeda in Iraq. Political progress is an important, but secondary issue. If we leave now, al Qaeda will rightly be perceived as having evicted American forces from Iraq (and then they'll do the same in Afghanistan). This will restore their badly tarnished reputation throughout the Muslim world and reverse their recent heavy setbacks in Iraq. If we instead leave after having turned the Sunnis against them and chasing them out of Iraq, then al Qaeda will have ruined its own reputation among Muslims and will have achieved nothing for its trouble. Iraq will be al Qaeda's Vietnam, and this is true whether or not Iraqi politicians can get their act together.

Tomorrow, I'll bring you a more detailed analysis of civilian casualties in Iraq.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds points out that Harry Reid has, for the moment, delayed his campaign to engineer America's defeat at the hands of al Qaeda in Iraq:

HARRY REID SOFTENS ON IRAQ: "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has backed down from demands for a withdrawal of our troops in Iraq by next spring. Selling voters on cut and run was always tough, but now a new UPI/Zogby Poll finds that 54% of Americans believe the Iraq war is not lost.

I guess the idea is to embrace defeat when it is politically expedient to do so and then to abandon that strategy when the political payoff seems less certain. Now that's backbone.

UPDATE II: This story from the AP is consistent with my report above:

More than 1,800 Iraqis killed in August

BAGHDAD - A huge suicide attack in northern Iraq caused civilian deaths to rise slightly in August despite security gains elsewhere, making it the second deadliest month for Iraqis since the U.S. troop buildup began, figures compiled by The Associated Press showed Saturday.

At least 1,809 civilians were killed, compared to 1,760 in July, based on figures compiled from official Iraqi reports.
...
U.S. deaths last month remained well below figures from last winter, when the U.S began dispatching 30,000 additional troops to Iraq.

The trend is the same, though the specific numbers differ. The AP often includes deaths of Iraqi security officials and refers to them as "civilians." They also list 520 killed by that spectacular suicide bombing by al Qaeda, whereas Iraq Coalition Casualty Count puts the number at 400. Despite these differences, the overall story is much the same. However, one difference is that the AP report says that August was "...the second deadliest month for Iraqis since the U.S. troop buildup began." That does not seem right to me, and it does not correspond to media reports tracked by Iraq Coalition Casualty Count. The reporter offers no data to back his assertion.