Fred Kaplan: Overtaken by Events

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“:

So, what accounts for the decline in American deaths since the summer? It’s hard to say for sure, but one little-reported cause is almost certainly a relative shift in U.S. tactics from fighting on the ground to bombing from the air.