US casualties rising to near record levels:

The number of U.S troops wounded in Iraq has surged to its highest monthly level in nearly two years as American GIs fight block-by-block in Baghdad to try to check a spiral of sectarian violence that U.S. commanders warn could lead to civil war.

Spin! Spin my pretties!

Last month, 776 U.S. troops were wounded in action in Iraq, the highest number since the military assault to retake the insurgent-held city of Fallujah in November 2004, according to Defense Department data. It was the fourth-highest monthly total since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
The sharp increase in American wounded -- with nearly 300 more in the first week of October -- is a grim measure of the degree to which the U.S. military has been thrust into the lead of the effort to stave off full-scale civil war in Iraq, military officials and experts say. Beyond Baghdad, Marines battling Sunni insurgents in Iraq's western province of Anbar last month also suffered their highest number of wounded in action since late 2004

If you can't define Chi square, you have no business opining about Iraq.

The study concludes that an average of 470 Iraqis per day have likely died as a result of political violence since March 19, 2003, though the number could be as low as 350 per day if the margin of error skewed to the low side. United Nations estimates based on figures from Iraqi morgues are more like 100 per day.

I follow the violence in Iraq carefully and daily, and I find the results plausible.

First of all, Iraqi Muslims don't believe in embalming or open casket funerals days later. They believe that the body should be buried by sunset the day of death, in a plain wooden box. So there is no reason to expect them to take the body to the morgue. Although there are benefits to registering with the government for a death certificate, there are also disadvantages. Many families who have had someone killed believe that the government or the Americans were involved, and will have wanted to avoid drawing further attention to themselves by filling out state forms and giving their address.

Personally, I believe very large numbers of Iraqi families quietly bury their dead without telling the government of all people anything about it. Another large number of those killed is dumped in the Tigris river by their killers.

470 per day in a population of 26 million is %0.000018 (I think JC missed a decimal place, fuzzy humanities guy that he is). Putting it in perspective, for a population like ours of 300 million, that would mean 5,424 people dying each day were a similar conflict occuring here.

Civil war? No, it's out and out chaos at this point.

Update: Johnson says: I told you so!

What the United States needs to do, it cannot do. We need at least 250,000 troops in western Iraq to shut down the insurgent routes. We need 100,000 troops to take control of Baghdad and bring an end to the sectarian strife. and we need at least 100,000 troops to maintain the lines of communication supplying our own forces. We do not have the manpower to meet this requirement.

As a result, our troops are in the midst of a sectarian-based civil war without the resources or means to achieve victory. Our presence feeds the insurgency because we are unable to stem the violence. The average Iraqi believes this is a deliberate policy of the United States. They can't understand how a superpower cannot reestablish 24 hour electrical service. They conclude that the violence and lack of power are a deliberate decision by the United States to enslave the Iraqi people. And, our presence also is the major recruitment poster for the international jihadists, who long for a final confrontation with the United States.

Gosh, facts can be ugly. Too bad the Republicans seem to only care about pretty things, like pages' bottoms.