Guest post by Ed Stephan.
The White House seems to be happy with what’s going on in Iraq during recent weeks. Bush, augmenting his remarks with a Pat-Robertson’s semi-giggle, tells us he’s “pleased”.
Speaking in the White House Rose Garden, Bush said he was pleased with progress in Iraq more than two years after he declared the end of major combat operations.
In his own garden at the U.S. Naval Observatory, Cheney purred to hard-hitting interviewer Larry King that we’ve made “major progress” in Iraq.
“The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”
It’s actually hard to tell what’s been going on over the last few weeks. There’s been very little coverage of Iraq in the news media, considering we’re still “at war” there. Apparently “no news is good news” for this Administration. Even Mark Fiore begins his wonderful Democracy Lite animated cartoon with a soothing “Now that Iraq is all Okay … the world is being transformed, just like the neocons promised” followed by a satiric review of conditions elsewhere: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan.
But is everything Okay in Iraq? What kind of progress are we making with the Occupation? And at what cost? U.S. military deaths keep going up and up there. No matter what happens, no matter how those events are spun, no matter how little coverage there is, the steady increase in U.S. military deaths in Iraq continues with a regularity which looks, graphically, more like a mechanical than a human process. I should mention that even that graph doesn’t tell the whole story. Some U.S. military deaths are not counted as such, e.g., those which occur after evacuation from the campaign area.
Unmentioned anywhere is the fact that, reported or not, the trend in the monthly death rates is going up, not down. It’s easy enough to demonstrate by entering the monthly totals on a spread sheet and having it display the “trend line” (aka, “least-squares regression line”):
The monthly U.S. death toll, which was averaging less than 50 toward the beginning of the occupation is, after more than two years, now nearing 80 and still climbing. And Bush and Cheney, reporting from their respective garden parties with a docile press, both tell us that they are “pleased”.