Cole's Grim Math
Posted by Ray Robison on 08.14.2007
In an effort to suppress reporting of a successful surge in Iraq, Juan Cole in Salon contrives number contrasts in order to show no improvement there. But are his numbers telling the entire tale?
Leaping over the we support the troops-esque statement in which Cole calls a US general in Iraq a "propagandist-in-chief in Baghdad" we get to the numbers portion "but by what measure, exactly, have we reduced the amount of violence"? Or as Cole could have asked: by what measures can I try to make the effort look like a failure?
Cole focuses in on the fact that attacks trend downwards in July every year because "guerrillas usually prefer not to operate with heavy explosives when it is 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade." Of course his reasoning doesn't explain why the US fatalities are always lower in March than in July if the heat is the main factor.
He wants you to think the reduction would have happened anyway and from a month to month perspective it would have. Of course this didn't bother the Democrats prior to the November 2006 elections when they used the predictable Ramadan spike to claim things were spinning out of control.
Cole's reasoning says that since the dip was going to happen anyway it is not really a dip worth consideration and leaves it at that. But a look at the proceeding two years shows a trend. March death tolls for US troops are usually significantly lower than in July. Why is this important? Because what we are looking for is a way to tell if the surge is working. Considering how high the tolls went it is unreasonable to compare monthly total now directly to proceeding years in a month by month Analysis. We already know the violence went up this year; we need to determine where it is likely to go from here.
When we compare March vs. July 2006 and 2007 (and also holds true for 2004 and 2003) we see an increase. For 2006 the fatalities for US forces increased from 33 to 46 a 28% increase. In 2005 it went from 35 to 54 or an increase of 35%.
But this year, for the first time it went from 81 in March to 80 in July, a decrease (1%). Considering that the surge was just lining up in March it is clear that the surge coupled with improved tactics have had a strong impact.
Cole also avoids the reality that an increase in troop numbers with a decrease in fatalities makes his math smell pretty sour. The oft quoted numbers are a 30k increase in forces for 160k total in country. Thus we can look at the months before the surge at roughly 130k in country. For the month of July the fatality rate for US forces was .05% or half of one percent. For the proceeding March with 130k troops and 81 fatalities the rate was .06%. In other words, even with the increase of 23% of troops at pre-surge levels the fatalities rate and whole number dropped in what should have been a month of increase.
An Iraq utopia? Of course not. These numbers are our people and they matter. But if Cole is going to paint a picture of a propagandizing military then somebody needs to check his grim math.
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