Reflections on Iraq, Three Years Later

The USA Today tackles the issue of why more Iraqis are dying even as fewer Americans are being killed in Iraq. The problem is that they never acknowledge the fact that the terrorists are going after civilian populations because it truly is a suicide mission to do so against the US forces and increasingly against the Iraqi military.

Civilians are easy targets, so that inflates the death toll.

But the article throws this part in without separating the death toll from those injured, giving a false sense of what is going on:

According to U.S. military data, about 15 Americans and 73 Iraqis are killed or injured each day. A USA TODAY analysis of U.S. military data shows the number of U.S. forces killed during the war has declined steadily since November.

If you combine the number of those wounded with the number killed, you get a far higher number than if you simply list the average of those killed.

It would have been nice to break those figures out instead of combining them, but that's bias for ya.

Then there's the not insignificant issue of the words used to describe the current violence in Iraq. The fashionable people are throwing around terms like civil war and sectarian violence, thinking that because there was violence between Sunni and Shi'ite that we're witnessing the birth of a civil war between the two religious groups. That grossly distorts reality given that the two religious groups have been at odds since the two religious orders established themselves more than 1,000 years ago.

Wretchard notes the problems with calling this conflict a civil war. There's no reason to believe Allawi when he says that Iraq is falling into civil war. He's got his own interests in mind when making those statements, and they are political in nature.

There is no organized group running the opposition to the Iraqi government - the insurgents and terrorists are engaging in violence for violence's sake, not to gain or hold territory, not to recruit new members to its cause, and not to form a rival government. We continue to witness bombings that are being directed against civilian populations in increasing frequency because the terrorists cannot succeed against armed forces of the coalition or Iraqis themselves. Even the civilians are fed up with the situation and turning on the insurgents and terrorists.

All Things Beautiful considers the political aspects of forming the new Iraqi government. Factionalism is a beautiful thing. It forces compromise for things to get done and tends to limit extremism. Just read the Federalist Papers. Or, look at how Congress and the US government has operated over the past 200 years. We've seen time and time again a move to the center of the political spectrum where one party is counterbalanced by another, and a fight for the center.

Dr. Sanity has more. And Iraq the Model wonders about whether the move to remove Saddam was worth it. I still think the answer is an emphatic yes. We're talking about eliminating a genocidal dictator from power, whose ambitions for regional dominance threatened not only US interests in the region, but the lives of millions of people.