by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
I was hoping to have some measurement of civilian death rates to accompany my charts of US casualty rates, since one could conceivably make the case that an increase in US casualties is an acceptable loss if it leads to a substantial reduction of violence in Iraq. But apparently I'm not going to get the chance.
This is, of course, sheer lunacy. If the only measurements of the "success" come in anecdote form, there's no way to prove that the violence simply hasn't moved somewhere that the US isn't monitoring as closely. Or that the violence level is the same, but there's just more good news mixed in with the daily grind. Or ... well, you get the picture. The public really deserves empirical evidence that the surge is or isn't working.
