The left is looking for any explanation for the progress in Iraq that would obviate the need to credit the Bush administration and its new strategy (see the latest from the Daily Kos: “As U.S. casualties have continued to drop, many people on the anti-Bush side of the aisle have begun to quietly panic in recent days over this question: ‘Could George W. Bush and Frederick Kagan have possibly been right about the surge?'”), but the job is getting harder and harder. One clever explanation of why the good news is really bad came on October 25 from Slate military reporter Fred Kaplan. Ever skeptical of the possibility of victory in Iraq, he tried to explain the recent decline in U.S. casualties in a piece titled “An Airstrike a Day Won’t Keep Insurgents at Bay“:
Kaplan provided the numbers to illustrate his point, and there is no doubt that, during the first nine months of the year, the U.S. military made greater use of airpower than at any time since the opening of the war. This came as a surprise to many, as the Petraeus strategy seemed to marginalize airpower, and the Air Force had openly criticized his new counterinsurgency strategy as too dismissive of the contribution the Air Force could make in Iraq. But with more troops on the ground, and those troops more aggressively confronting al Qaeda and other sectarian militias, there were more calls for air support and more bombs dropped. One problem: the theory seems to have been overtaken by events. Stars & Stripes reported yesterday on a recent decline in the use of airpower–“Pilots tallying fewer bombings as Iraq hits lull.” The paper explains:
Kaplan had a perfectly plausible theory, but it breaks down as soon as casualties and sorties fall in tandem. He also didn’t include statistics from Anbar, but in Iraq, it’s all quiet on the western front–not a single American has been killed by an IED in that province in nearly two months. And now we are seeing a very real decline in the amount of munitions dropped elsewhere. Stars & Stripes cautions against reading too much into the drop too soon, but “any drop is good news”:
I eagerly await the Fred Kaplan column explaining how this drop, too, isn’t the good news it appears to be.
