Deaths Down for Second Month

Is this a trend yet? For once, the AP is jumping the gun. The month is not even over and they're reporting the large drop in Iraqi civilian and U.S. military deaths for October. It'll be the second month in a row that saw a drop in deaths.

For people who were content to rest their reporting on "grim milestones," they've started looking for another measure of success failure awfully fast:

While the decline in deaths is notable, it is only one of many measures of potential progress in Iraq, said Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon analyst now with the private Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Cordesman said a more balanced picture needs to include factors such as wounded civilians and soldiers and the number of people fleeing their homes. The U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday that between 1,000 and 2,000 Iraqis still leave their homes each day for safer havens in the country or in neighboring nations. "It's just been going up slowly," said U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees spokeswoman Astrid van Genderen Stort in Geneva.

He's right, of course. Success or its lack are based on more than just counting up the dead. How convenient that they have figured this out now.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 10:46 AM

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