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CIVILIAN CASUALTIES. It should go without saying that when an organization refuses to count civilian casualties, argues that civilian casualty counts are irrelevant to an evaluation of war aims, and either ignores or disputes the most sophisticated methodology for counting civilian casualties, that claims such as this...
American and Iraqi officials said Sunday that they saw a decline in the monthly civilian casualty count in June, a development that occurred as the American troop increase reached full strength.
...shouldn't be taken terribly seriously. The development and execution of doctrine does require solid quantitative data about effectiveness, but given that no such data has been accumulated in a reliable fashion, it's absurd to take this claim at face value.
That said, I certainly hope that June does herald a reduction in civilian casualty rates. I just can't believe that a military organization that has declared such counts irrelevant and an Iraqi government that has done its best to obscure the data really cares about the count.
--Robert Farley
COMMENTS (2)
Partlow and Wilgoren in today's WaPo:
"Establishing the number of civilians killed in Iraq is difficult because there is no reliable or transparent system to track the figures. The U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq had been providing periodic statistics on civilian casualties but did not include death tolls in its last human rights report in April because the Iraqi government failed to provide them.
"We have no way of determining the veracity of these figures," said Said Arikat, a U.N. spokesman in Baghdad. "We call on the government to release those figures to us. I think it's important for Iraq and important for the government of Iraq."
Too bad it's the last two paragraphs in a story titled '5 U.S. Troops Killed in Attacks in Iraq' and not a story of it's own.
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