Casualties in October

You have probably heard about how bloody October was for our soldiers in Iraq. The liberals said that the high loss of life showed that our mission in Iraq was failing, whereas some conservatives believed that October's violence reflected a surge aimed at affecting our Congressional elections. Now that the casualty numbers from November are in, we see the October surge in violence as just that: a temporary surge. The Coalition suffered 110 deaths of all kinds in October, including 102 from hostile action, which places October 2006 in a tie with November 2003 as our fourth-worst month thus far. September showed 76 losses and November 77, so the spike in October appears to be a surge that the insurgents arranged to influence our elections. Make no mistake about how savvy our enemies are about using our own media against us. They got CNN to air video footage of sniper teams killing American soldiers, so in that case Ted Turner's network did their publicity job for them.
What you haven't heard is that the casualty numbers for 2006 - even if December is our worst month ever - will fall far short of the casualty numbers from 2005 and 2004. As you know, the media calculates casualties by including all deaths, lumping hostile deaths in with vehicle accidents and illnesses. I have been recording casualties noting a separation between hostile and non-hostile causes of death. We have lost so few men to non-hostile causes of death in the last year that the numbers of total casualties are coming down. Our hostile losses are about the same, and could possibly surpass hostile losses from 2005, but the total is all you ever hear about, so it looks as though the insurgents are killing fewer of our troops. Ironically, the favorite tactic of the anti-war drive-by media is backfiring.