A word on casualties

If you hadn't heard by now, the surge is working, all is well and the some of the troops will be coming home within the next year and a half.

Okay, first off, to the dip shit who works for the Washington Times and thinks, or is at least trying to convince his readers, that the Democratic Party is some kind of branch of the "Green International", I will only remind you that the Democratic Leadership is responsible or partially responsible for such things in recent history as this, this, and this. For the last time, they are not a left-wing party! They have a few leftists who've decided to affect the system from the inside, but if you look at the DLC's platform you'll find something more or less similar to the New Labor platform in the UK. What is with this seeing every liberal as a latent Marxist? THERE'S A DIFFERENCE AND IT IS FAIRLY VAST, STOP USING THE TERMS INTERCHANGEABLY!

Anyway, now that we've got that out of the way, back to the surge. The main argument that surge proponents are using to justify their pre-emptive claims of victory are the newest casualty metrics. First, there is the problem of using casualties as a signal that you've won or lost. In Fourth Generation Warfare strategic objectives are almost entirely defined by social progress. If you can get the electricity on and water flowing despite the ongoing violence, you win. The difficulty of doing this is the reason why Fourth Generation wars tilt to the guerrilla side over 80% of the time.

Second, there is the problem of the numbers being presented by the papers and broadcasts of record. According to the most recent numbers from the New York Times' Michael Gordon we would be led to believe that fewer than 500 Iraqi civilians were killed in October and November. What Gordon doesn't tell you, like his counterparts at CNN, CBS and Fox, is where he got those numbers from. They are all using the data provided by the Iraq Coalition Casualties Project which I have a link to on the right hand side of this page. What's wrong with using that data? Only this little disclaimer at the top of the Civilian Casualties page, in blue text, for all to see. It isn't a complete data set. Why isn't a complete data set? Because they are hamstrung by choosing to report only incidents verified both my the media and coalition forces. Given that coalition forces are generally more concerned with keeping order than investigating each individual death it shouldn't surprise anyone that such a data set would be well under the actual totals.

For comparison we can look at the most conservative count that can purport to be reasonable at all, Iraq Body Count. As we can see on the iCasualties page linked above, there have been 257 tallied civilian deaths as of December 13. If we go over to Iraq Body Count's incident report page and take out our handy dandy calculator, we'll add up the total deaths as verified by multiple media and health organization outlets and come up with...440? But the Times and Nightly News are using iCasualties, shouldn't that... No, it shouldn't. Once again the news sources of record have failed miserably at math and intelligence gathering and unintentionally bolstered the administration and its supporters. By relying too much on military reporting and not enough on independently operating sources they've screwed up again and left an administration that should have long exhausted its credibility with yet more breathing space and clout with which to pummel the inept opposition some more. You're welcome gang.