Cross-Posted at Democrashield
A lot of people have been asking this question recently, and I thought I’d do my best to try to sort this out using hard data. I looked at the number of U.S. wounded and casualties during the surge, as well as during the same period in the past two years. I would have liked to examine Iraqi civilian and military casualties, but there isn’t enough reliable information.
The philosophy of the surge is simple—by putting more troops in Iraq, we can fight and defeat more insurgents in more areas, and therefore foster more stability and less violence. If this were the case, then during the implementation of the surge there should have been a corresponding drop-off in violence. As the number of troops in Iraq increased, violence should have decreased.
We'll look at the numbers after the jump...
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