By the way, a big thank you to Jim Henley for the link.
Here is a post I did back at the start of 2005, predicting some things for the year.
How did I do?
1) At least 1000 American troops will die in Iraq during 2004. Troop levels will not decrease unless by necessity.
So far 844 troops have died in 2005. Barring 156 deaths in the next 18 hours or so (I'm assuming that 2005 ends for casualty counting purposes at midnight Iraqi time), this prediction will not have come true.
Troop levels reached a new high this year, and the baseline level is around 138,000. So this prediction was accurate. This graph gives a better idea of U.S. troop levels throughout the war.
2) The January 30 elections will occur, and there will be many charges of irregularities by the Sunnis, and some charges of irregularities by a few Kurdish and Shiite groups, although the majority of those groups will support the results, or at least be indifferent to them.
This is more or less what happened, I think. I'll try to find some documents to support this.
3) The insurgency will not be affected in any significant way by the elections.
Well, if one measures the strength of the insurgency by the number of combat deaths it produces, the insurgency certainly appears to have gotten weaker at the start of 2005; the number of monthly coalition deaths it produced dipped below 50 for 3 months (February, March, and April), after having been above 50 each month since August 2004. Of course, the number of deaths in the Iraqi military went up beginning in March, and the number of Iraqi civilians killed may have also gone up during this time, although no information on the civilians is available for January or February, so this isn't possible to tell at this time.
In any case, the number of coalition troops killed by hostile action went back up again in May and has stayed up for the most part since, with fatalities at 69 or above for 5 out of 8 months since, and above 45 for the other 3. During the same time, there was a marked increase in the number of Iraqi deaths, both civilian (compared to March and April) and military (compared to January through April), the former of which has stayed up throughout the year, and the latter of which has gone back down to March and April, but not January and February, levels.
Coalition wounded appear to be down, but I am not certain that that is due to the elections as much as to either increases in body armor or in alterations in the tactics of the insurgency (e.g. more IEDs, fewer armed confrontations).
I think it is fair to say that the insurgency has not been terribly affected in terms of its strength by the elections. I am cannot think of any other way in which it has been affected by the elections either [i.e. I see no effect on its make-up or tactics that appears to be connected to the elections], so I think that my prediction was correct.
[For more discussion on the insurgency throughout 2004 and 2005, see here, here, and here; these posts compare the statistics for 2004 to those for 2005; this is almost the same as comparing the year before and the year after the elections, except that it includes January 2005 as the beginning of the later period being compared instead of the end of the earlier period].
4) Ahmad Chalabi will get a position of political power.
Well, he didn't do too well in the recent elections, but he has been oil minister, deputy prime minister is now being put in charge of the oil ministry again.
Whether or not his current position is a "politically elected" one, it do give him political power, so I was right about this. Moreover, his position as deputy prime minister was not only one with political power, but one that was at least partly due to the election, and therefore a political position in all sense of the word, so I was very right about this.
5) Neither Syria nor Iran will fall on its own, but we will not invade either or them either, as we lack the number of troops to do so. Basically, I don't see the situation in the greater Middle East (i.e. outside of Iraq) changing a whole lot, whatever occurs in the war on terror or in Iraq.
Yup. Pretty much what happened, unless the de-occupation of Lebanon is considered things "changing a whole lot."
6) Nothing will happen on the Social Security front.
Nothing has.
7) Bush's amnesty proposal will begin to cause a break-up of the GOP; not that people will defect, but we will get increasing levels of criticism from the GOP against Bush that will make it difficult for the GOP to get any sort of agenda passed.
We are seeing an increasing willingness to criticize Bush on a number of issues, but that may be more from the Harriet Miers controversy than from amnesty. However, on the whole my prediction here was borne out.
8) Nothing new will happen on the gay "marriage" front.
Well, in England gay unions are now legal, and a few states may have made moves in the direction of gay quasi-marriage, but there have been no new states legalizing gay marriage, no progress on the anti-same-sex marriage amendment, and nothing really altering the situation on actual gay marriage in the U.S., and my predictions about gay marriage were mainly intended to be about gay marriage in the U.S. So I think that my prediction by and large was accurate.
9) There will be a major terrorist attack (>100 deaths) in Europe by Muslims that will cause an anti-Muslim backlash.
There was a smaller attack in England (~60 deaths), but it has not led to an anti-Muslim backlash. There were also major but mostly non-fatal riots in France, which have not apparently led to a backlash yet. Australia has had an anti-Muslim backlash, but not as a response to a major terrorist attack. So this prediction did not quite pan out.
Here I made two other predictions
I think that the Dow will go below 10,000 at least once.
No, not if you count by closing prices (see chart but we came close. And the Dow did get as low as 9,961.52 during the trading day. (This chart apparently tracks the average over the day, not just at closing). If anyone has a link to the highest and lowest closing prices of the Dow for 2005, it would be appreciated.
We will still have at least 150,000 troops in Iraq by December.
Yup-yup-yup-yup-yup-yup-yup-yup. Yup-yup-yup-yup-yup-yup-yup-yup.
Uuuuhhhh-huh, uuuuuuh-huh.(1)
So there you have it.
Predictions for 2006 to come out soon.
That is all.
(1) Apologies to Sesame Street.
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