Casualties in Iraq - Dallas-Mavs.com Forums

dude1394 · 12-01-2007, 01:28 PM

Mr. Engram has his monthly review of the Iraq casualties. As he says, it's really the only way to keep "score" in a war zone. Some interesting history as well about that, about how our leaders also measure success.

http://engram-backtalk.blogspot.com/...mber-2007.html

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Back in July, Wolf Blitzer interviewed left wing anti-war icon John Murtha. Here is some of what he had to say:

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REP. JOHN MURTHA (D), PENNSYLVANIA: Nice to be with you, Wolf.

BLITZER: I'm going to play a little excerpt of what the president said earlier today and get your reaction. Listen to him.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: I don't think Congress ought to be running the war. I think they ought to be funding our troops. I'm certainly interested in their opinion. But trying to run a war through resolution is a prescription for failure as far as I'm concerned and we can't afford to fail.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: All right. What do you say to the president?

MURTHA: Well it's delusional to say the least. As I said earlier, and you heard me say it, it's a failed policy wrapped in illusion. Nothing's gotten better. Incidents have increased. We have had more Americans killed in the last four months than any other period during the war.
...
So, our troops are caught in a civil war. As I said over and over again, it can't be won militarily. There can only be a diplomatic effort. I think this surge is a perfect example where we aren't making any progress, and we've got to start to redeploy the troops as quickly as possible.
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MURTHA: I don't acknowledge there has been any progress made. Maybe in Baghdad. But it just breaks out someplace else. We called for extra troops two years ago. We put money in for 30,000 troops. They haven't even been able to raise the 30,000 troops they have. So they have to break all their guidelines. But there's no progress being made. And the way you measure it is, is the security itself.

Are the incidents decreased? No. Have the civilian deaths gone down? No. Have the American deaths increased? Yes. That's the way you measure whether we're making progress.

That's the way you measure progress? You don't say.

Other Democrats were equally prophetic:

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"The surge was supposed to bring stability.... It hasn't and it won't," Ted Kennedy said on May 1. "The evidence is clear it is not happening and it will not happen," Dodd said May 15 of a potential American victory. Durbin said the day after: "This Senate knows that the administration's policy in Iraq has failed." Senator Joseph Biden agreed. "The surge has not worked and will not work," he said on June 1. And in a joint letter to the president on June 13, Reid and Pelosi said, "As many had foreseen, the escalation has failed to produce the intended results."
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As Harry Reid put it on July 9, "Democrats and military experts and the American people know the president's current strategy is not working and we cannot wait until September to act." As Dianne Feinstein put it, "Today, a majority of the Senate sees that the surge is not working. ... Do we change course now or do we wait until September... I believe the answer is clear."

Hillary Clinton also weighed in and had this to say:

WASHINGTON — Senator Clinton squared off yesterday with her possible challenger for the White House in 2012, General David Petraeus, and came closer than any of her colleagues to calling the commander of the multinational forces in Iraq a liar.

Using blunter language than any other Democrat in the last two days, Mrs. Clinton told General Petraeus that his progress report on Iraq required "a willing suspension of disbelief."

Those are your liberal leaders characterizing the effectiveness of the troop surge -- the very people you think should be in charge of national security. And their point was not merely that the surge wasn't working. They wanted everyone to also know that, in their expert opinion, the surge would never work.

Were they right? Here is my monthly tally of civilian casualties in Iraq based on the data at Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (with necessary corrections described here):

More from Mr. Engram.

[quote]I'm frankly amazed that al Qaeda has not been able to pull off a single spectacular mass-casualty attack for 3 straight months. They are undoubtedly highly motivated to do so, in part because they know that Democrats in Washington are veritable puppets on a string. Does that sound harsh? It doesn't to me. Harry Reid's declaration of America's ignominious defeat in Iraq came in direct response to this attack by al Qaeda on innocent Shiite civilians in Baghdad:

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Suspected Qaeda bombs kill nearly 200 in Baghdad

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Wed Apr 18, 2007

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Suspected al Qaeda militants killed nearly 200 people in a wave of car bombings in Baghdad on Wednesday, including one that was the single deadliest attack in the Iraqi capital since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Here is Harry Reid's response the very next day:

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Iraq war is 'lost': US Democrat leader

Apr 19

The war in Iraq "is lost" and a US troop surge is failing to bring peace to the country, the leader of the Democratic majority in the US Congress, Harry Reid, said Thursday.

"I believe ... that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week," Reid told journalists.

In other words, al Qaeda commits an atrocity, and the Democrats immediately call for surrender -- right on cue and in exact accordance with al Qaeda's nefarious plan. While behaving in that manner, the Democrats also repeatedly and eerily denied that al Qaeda was a significant factor in Iraq. To them, it was all just a big ol' civil war based on ancient hostilities between Shiites and Sunnis. Here is Democratic Presidential candidate Christopher Dodd nicely summing up the creepy Democratic stance that has been in effect for the last several years:

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Again, this is a civil war going on in Iraq. This is not the United States versus Al Qaida. It's Shia versus Sunnis tearing each other apart. It's gone on for centuries, but particularly here right now.

All Democrats and most Americans actually believed this nonsense. And, of course, the mainstream media (especially, New York Times, of course) bent over backwards to explain how simplistic Bush was being for emphasizing the indisputable fact that we were at war with al Qaeda in Iraq: