Steve Coll of The New Yorker describes the situation in post-surge Iraq as “patchwork calm,” and here’s one feature of said calm: “Violent deaths of Iraqi civilians, while difficult to measure, have also dropped steeply, although the figure remains high: about five hundred per month, at a conservative estimate.”
Five hundred violent deaths per month, and this is what the Republicans are calling, and bullying the Democrats into calling, “success,” “victory,” what have you. When General Petraeus testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in September 2007, Senator Obama said:
…[W]e have now set the bar so low that modest improvement in what was a completely chaotic situation, to the point where now we just have the levels of intolerable violence that existed in June of 2006 is considered success, and it’s not.
It remains one of the most incisive and true statements about the war, and Obama needs to start reiterating it.
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