"Experts" Wrong: Casualties Reach Seven-Month High

In the rush to cover current events, we often forget to go back and really mock the so-called "experts" who’ve said some of the dumber things about the war in Iraq recently.  So I want to take a few minutes this morning to do just that.  Doing so will better enable us to heap scorn on them when they attempt to say similar stupid shit in the future.

But first off, let’s consider the current situation in Iraq:

51 Americans died in Iraq this past month, making April 2008 the deadliest for U.S. troops since last summer--the bloodiest of the war.  This represents a more than 30 percent increase in combat fatalities over March (during the Basra fighting).  However, more telling than that, is the fact that American deaths in Iraq are up 122 percent since December.  

In fact, here are two casualty line graphs.  The first one shows American deaths from May through December of last year.  After a spike in January (not shown), the second graph shows American deaths since February 1st of this year.  See the trends:

 

On the Iraqi side, 925 people were killed in Sadr City in April alone.  Most of these were civilians.  As Sadr City is six square miles in size, that represents roughly 150 deaths per square mile in that section of Baghdad during the month.

This is ironic considering the things many so-called "experts" were saying until recently.  In fact, the sheer magnitude of the wrongness they exhibited will likely be studied by scholars for decades to come, once this war is over.  Let’s take a look at a couple:

On January 28th, Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, made this comment:

Pity the U.S. presidential candidates. They had their positions on Iraq all worked out by last summer and have repeated them consistently ever since. But events on the ground have changed dramatically, and their rhetoric feels increasingly stale. They're fighting the Iraq War all right, but it's the wrong one.

The Democrats are having the hardest time with the new reality. Every candidate is committed to "ending the war" and bringing our troops back home. The trouble is, the war has largely ended, and precisely because our troops are in the middle of it.

The war "has largely ended," he said.  Those silly, whiny Democrats.  That’s interesting because, in the last three days of April, American forces have had to initiate an invasion-like push into Sadr City with the use of heavy armor and MLRS artillery.  This push has been in response to the sustained heavy shelling the Green Zone has received for the past few weeks, and it’s resulted in the deaths of 10 Americans in the last 72 hours.  Considering that this has capped off the deadliest month for Americans in Iraq in the past seven months, I’m not sure what Fareed meant when he so pompously pronounced that the war had "largely ended."

What Fareed and others of his ilk fail to see is that the violence in Iraq is cyclical.  I will keep saying this until I’m blue in the face: It’s cyclical.  And it will remain that way until we leave.  For these idiots, every time violence drops off for a few weeks or months, they take it as a sign of validation and victory.  

They’re completely misunderstanding what’s happening.

Another "expert" who recently made a fool of himself is Frederick Kagan.  People like Kagan are the reason why someone long ago invented the expression, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."  Here’s the "surge architect" in March:

The situation in Iraq today is, I think, not that fragile if we don’t make the mistake of pulling out prematurely.

Kagan said the situation in Iraq was "not that fragile" only days before violence exploded across Baghdad and southern Iraq--violence that eventually led to 71 American deaths over the next six weeks and to well over 1,000 Iraqi deaths in Sadr City alone.  His "not-that-fragile" remark did not take into consideration the brewing Shia civil war that was on the verge of threatening the stability of half of Iraq.  He went on to say:

If we don’t make that mistake, then I think what we’re seeing in general terms is that the momentum on almost all of the trend lines is in the right direction.

Like these trend lines?

 

Again, Kagan failed to understand how American forces are acting as an irritant in the Iraqi system--and how we’re inhibiting Iraqis from progressing on their own--as violent as that progress could potentially be.  When he made his comments, he failed to see the cyclical nature of the conflict.  And in so doing, he showed us once again why he’s not qualified to comment on the war in Iraq.

And these aren’t the only two.  Bill O’Reilly said on January 2nd that

"by all accounts, the security situation in Iraq has improved drastically in just a few months. The surge by American troops has worked."

 

Shortly thereafter, Kimberly Kagan and Max Boot also proclaimed imminent "victory" in the weeks after December’s lull.  

It’s a pattern: Any lull in violence and these geniuses start ranting about impending success.  And, to a person, they don’t get it.  They don’t get the fact that this is not only cyclical, but it’s not even our fight to "win."

All we can do is continue to highlight just how wrong they are each time one of them makes another ignorant, premature prediction about the situation in Iraq.
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