Though statistics from the Iraqi Health Ministry surely undercount the full civilian death toll, the trends have been significant. The 88 civilian deaths in November represent the first time that the monthly body count has dropped below 100 since Bush unleashed the carnage with the March 2003 invasion.
Yet how those numbers are interpreted is having dramatic consequences for the war in Afghanistan. In Washington, Republican politicians and the ever-influential neoconservative pundits have sold the simplistic narrative that Bush's courageous "surge did the trick.
During last year's presidential campaign, Obama first tried to make a more sophisticated argument, crediting the "surge as only one factor in the decline in violence. But network anchors pummeled him in interviews, demanding that he accept that Republican John McCain " and President Bush " had been right about the surge and that Obama had been wrong to oppose it.
Unwilling to pay the price for challenging Washington's conventional wisdom, Obama finally ceded the point and admitted that the "surge had "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.
That concession " and Obama's decision to retain Gates and Petraeus " are now having real-life consequences for Afghanistan. Having bought into the "successful surge conventional wisdom, Obama is now "surging" some 30,000 additional troops into the Afghan war zone on top of some 22,000 that he sent in the spring, more than doubling the force there when Bush left office.
If the Washington pundit class had tolerated a different analysis of the Iraq casualty figures " that the way to reduce violence is to pullback U.S. occupation forces, not launch new offensives " there might have been a different result in Obama's Afghan deliberations.
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