By the Numbers

How powerful and effective is the insurgency in Iraq at damaging our war effort? Is it in decline or strengthening?

Using hostile coalition fatalities as a metric, let's compare 2004 to 2005.

Total hostile fatalities in 2004: 755
Hostile fatalities Jan. 1 - Oct. 31, 2004: 568

Total hostile fatalties Jan. 1 - Oct. 31, 2004: 579
Annualized: 695

Comparing this to my earlier graph, two trends become apparent:

First, the "background" number of deaths in a "typical" month was higher in 2005.
Second, 2005 has not had any "hostile death spikes" of the sort there were in 2004, in April and November, where hostile deaths rose dramatically for a month and then fell again. This is presumably due to the fact that the insurgents are no longer confronting us (or we them) in large battles in Fallujah (I was going to say "in cities such as Fallujah, but then realized that both of these fatality spikes came from Fallujah itself).

Now using American wounded-in-action (stats are not available for the rest of the coalition or for non-hostile wounded) - Stats for October 2005 are not complete yet, so I am not including October stats in year-to-date calculations)

WIA in 2004: 7987
WIA Jan. 1 - Sept. 30, 2004 (Stats for October are not complete yet): 5372

WIA Jan 1. - Sept. 30, 2005: 4513
Annualized: 6017

Wounded stats are generally slightly lower than in 2004, and there have been no "spikes."

As for Iraqi deaths, I don't have statistics to compare 2004 to 2005, but during 2005, the statistics would indicate that hostile deaths of Iraqi police and military increased during the first half of the year, then declined (so far) during the second half, whereas civilian deaths in general increased up to August, and then started to decline somewhat.

Based on these stats, the insurgency appears to have remained pretty stable throughout 2005.

This may be good news; if this means that the insurgency has peaked, it is possible that it will start to decline next year or in 2007.

On the other hand, it may just stay stable for another five or six years. This could put us into a waiting game, where the issue is how long we would be willing to "stay the course" until things improve - but we would have to "stay the course" for quite a while.

Or, it might go up, but likely slowly and without too many "spikes" in fatalities, which would be the worst-case scenario.

Being a pessimist on the Iraq War, I think the increase in fatalities scenario is the most likely one. But we will have to wait and see.

That is all.