THE O'HANLON PRIMARY. Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack's New York Times op-ed is a litany of utter dishonesty and misrepresentation; like Matt, I'm wondering whether any of the Democratic candidates will step up and try to win the "O'Hanlon primary" by publicly rejecting his strategic advice. O'Hanlon and Pollack insist that this is "a war that we just might win" without pausing to indicate what "victory" means in this context; at best, it seems, we could hope for some temporary stability. They seem to define stability as a reduction of civilian casualty rates by "roughly a third since the surge began". I've written before about the nonsensical efforts of surge advocates to claim success by pointing to Iraqi government casualty figures; no one believes that those figures are accurate, including the US military, the Iraqi government, and any sensible analyst. Nevertheless, lets take the argument seriously for a moment. If we take February 1 as the official start date (icasualties uses this date), then Iraqi casualties since the beginning of the Surge have amounted to 12741. Casualties in the six months prior to the Surge were 13462. That's a drop of about 700 dead, assuming that the count for July 2007 doesn't go up (it will). Okay, let's compare this six month period (12741) with the same six month period in 2006. From February through July of last year, 6216 Iraqis are recorded to have died. Note that 12741 is a larger number than 6216. Also note that the Golden Mosque was destroyed in February 2006, which set off (apparently not) the worst sectarian strife since the fall of Saddam.
