Saved by the Surge

It's quite telling that on the first of the month, rather than touting the recent success of our effort in Iraq, the Democrat Senate leadership was reduced to spouting phony talking points from Media Matters on the Senate floor.

Just pathetic.

With that in mind, check out John Podhoretz today and his piece in the NY Post.

IS the surge in Iraq working? Consider this plain, simple and overwhelmingly power ful fact: Hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis are alive today, on Oct. 2, who'd be dead by now if there had been no surge.

There were 1,975 Iraqi civilian fatalities in August. In September, the number fell to 922 - a drop of 53 percent.

How do we know this decline is due to the surge? We can't know for certain, of course. And there's a caveat: The fatality reduction in September is particularly dramatic because there was no attack last month to match the horrible slaughter of hundreds of members of the Yazidi sect in August.

That attack was actually an anomaly, as it was a strike against a small subgroup of Kurds who live in a long-pacified area where there is no sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shiites and no al Qaeda activity. There is very little American troop presence there, and the troop surge is entirely focused elsewhere.

So just for the sake of argument, let's remove the 350 Yazidi victims from the overall number of Iraqi fatalities in August. In that case, the drop in civilian casualties falls to 700 and the percentage decline falls to around 40 percent.

That's still a stunning change for the better - though we should keep our perspective and note that this just brings the level of violence against civilians to levels we last saw in early 2006. Everybody thought we were losing the war with those kinds of casualty numbers, so it doesn't make sense to claim that we're winning now that we've returned to these depressing statistics.

Read it all.