Partial Success

Reading this story reminded me of a series of articles that came out just before the January "election" in Iraq indicating the desire on the part of some administration officials (and then interim thug of the month moment Allawi) to go all Salvadoran on some Mesopotamian ass.

Well, if the Salvadoran option is truly being implemented, they're getting at least one thing right--the sheer numbers of people being killed:

Iraqi civilians and police officers died at a rate of more than 800 a month between August and May, according to figures released in June by the Interior Ministry.

In response to questions from The New York Times, the ministry said that 8,175 Iraqis were killed by insurgents in the 10 months that ended May 31. The ministry did not give detailed figures for the months before August 2004, nor did it provide a breakdown of the figures, which do not include either Iraqi soldiers or civilians killed during American military operations.

While the figures were not broken down month by month, it has been clear since the government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari took over after the Jan. 30 election that the insurgency is taking an increasing toll, killing Iraqi civilians and security workers at a faster rate...

In per capita terms, the highest death rates were in Anbar, Najaf and Diyala Provinces.

In all, the ministry listed 15,517 wounded in the same period. Of that figure, men made up the overwhelming majority, at 91 percent of the total. Cities in the northern Kurdish enclave were not included in the count.

Insurgent attacks claim the overwhelming majority of Iraqi lives now. In the two months after the Shiite-led government was announced, insurgents killed more than 1,500 Iraqis, a number approaching the total of American troops killed since the start of the war two years ago.

Deaths at the hands of Americans are statistically fewer, but far from uncommon. On June 25, a 21-year-old engineering student was shot dead during a house raid by marines in Anbar Province. The student, Muhammad Summaidai, answered the door and was excited to practice his English, according to an account by his cousin, Samir Summaidai, the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations. The marines took him to a back room to see the family's weapons. A short time later he was dead, shot through the neck in what his family says was a murder by the marines.

["The Americans have to be smarter - to hide and lay traps for the insurgents," Mr. Summaidai said by telephone in early July. "Not just to terrorize the community. That will not work."]

The marines said in a statement shortly after the incident that they were investigating.

One day earlier Yasser Salihee, an Iraqi employee of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, was shot and killed by an American sniper while he was on his way to a gas station, Knight Ridder said. That death is also under investigation.

"We monitor the deaths of civilians the best way we can," a military spokesman in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, said in an in e-mail message. But he added: "We do not have the ability to get accurate data. We do not have visibility all over Iraq in every location."

800 deaths a month compares, um, favorably, with statistics from Central America during the Reagan years.

Now, whether this is part of an overall plan or merely the inevitable outcome of such a stupidly planned (not to mention illegal) war hardly matters--death is death, and it's pretty hard to focus on whatever "good news" is out there when you're burying some 25 extra bodies a day. Hence, the best thing Team Bush can come up with on a regular basis is "we're making progress," which earlier this week I suggested was merely the "building a bridge to the 21st century" equivalent of "we're seeing light at the end of the tunnel" (hey--is that a train whistle I just heard?).

And, on the subject of past posts, take a look once again at what Riverbend said about the new Iraqi security forces:

As to Iraqi forces...many of their members were formerly part of militias, and that many of them contributed to the looting and burning that swept over Iraq after the war and continued for weeks...

The[ir] forte...? Raids and mass detentions. They have been learning well from the coalition. They sweep into areas, kick down doors, steal money, valuables, harass the females in the household and detain the men. The Iraqi security forces are so effective that a few weeks ago, they managed to kill a high-ranking police major in Falluja when he ran a red light, shooting him in the head as his car drove away.

Sounds rather death squadish to me.

And again, remember that ALL this has been utterly needless in terms of any sort of justifiable action in the so-called war on terror, although something tells me that the casualty count is definitely creating a sense of terror--if not rage--among Iraqis, who I can't imagine are all that thrilled being pawns in the chess game that Team Bush insisted back in 2003 was going to be easier than a game of checkers with our side having already been made kings.