OxBlog

# Posted 9:09 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE FACTS! Iraq Body Count (IBC) is a rather brazenly anti-American organization that has sought to discredit the occupation from Day 1 by counting civilian deaths in Iraq. Still, counting has its merits, even if OxBlog has shown how hard IBC works to skew its data in an anti-American direction.

Recently, IBC faced quite a dilemma. By early September, its data had begun to show a correlation between the surge of US forces and a visible reduction in the number of Iraqi civilians being killed. Remarkably, this development led IBC to worry that the anti-war left might consider it a shill for the Bush administration. In its defense, IBC explained that it:

...is aware that official reports are imminent concerning the progress of the US Government’s New Security Plan or ‘surge.’ However, IBC’s work is not linked to the political calendar, and the charts above are not intended to be directly comparable to data which may be supplied from official sources.

These charts sometimes indicate a modest improvement in the security situation for ordinary Iraqis post-surge, and this is not disputed. But these charts will tend to under-represent reported violence for the more recent periods, for the reasons stated above. The observed downward trend in these charts will likely become less marked as data still in the pipeline is added (see Recent Events for as yet unprocessed data).

You have to give IBC credit for hoping that enough Iraqis would die to discredit the surge. Sadly the terrorists and death squads failed to deliver. And the statistics from October aren't any better, even according to IBC. If you add up IBC's list of recent events, the total so far this month is around 600. Still horrific, but a far cry from the numbers of this spring or last fall.

Now, it's worth keeping in mind that accurate statistics about the civilian death toll are hard to come by. iCasualties, another site with no sympathies for the US war effort, list the current October toll at just over 400. For a look at the challenge of compiling such gruesome and tragic statistics, I highly recommend a recent column by Clark Hoyt, the NYT's public editor.

In closing, it is worth keeping mind a good point made by IBC, a point that has merit in spite of its authors' agenda:

It is important to place the events of 2007 in context. Levels of violence reached an all-time high in the last six months of 2006. Only in comparison to that could the first half of 2007 be regarded as an improvement

We should never forget how much Iraqis have suffered because of our failures as an occupying power. The actual killers were Sunni terrorists and Shi'ite death squads, but a successful occupation could have saved thousands and thousands of lives.

Labels: Iraq, Iraq Body Count, surge

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