Juan Cole: Everybody's Got A Status Report On Iraq These Days (Civilian Deaths Steady Through Surge)

[Hissyspit]

http://www.juancole.com/2007/09/mcclatchy-civilian-deaths-steady.html#comments

Monday, September 10, 2007
McClatchy: Civilian Deaths Steady through Surge;
August Secret Official Toll Staggering 2,890;
Mahdi Army Continuing Ethnic Cleansing

Everybody's got a status report on Iraq these days.

The consistently best and most clear-eyed wire service on Iraq, whose Pentagon correspondents are pointedly not invited to fly with the Secretary of Defense, is McClatchy (formerly Knight-Ridder). It has a long article on Sunday on how the security situation is not in fact better in Iraq now than last January. I'm going to pull out snippets below, some of them out of order:

"Civilian deaths haven't decreased in any significant way across the country, according to statistics from the Iraqi Interior Ministry, and numbers gathered by McClatchy Newspapers show no consistent downward trend even in Baghdad, despite military assertions to the contrary. The military has provided no hard numbers to back the claim. . ."

". . . Overall, civilian casualties in Iraq appear to have remained steady throughout the siege, though numbers are difficult to come by.

". . . According to the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, 984 people were killed across Iraq in February, and 1,011 died in violence in August. No July numbers were released because the ministry said the numbers weren't clear.

But an official in the ministry who spoke anonymously because he wasn't authorized to release numbers said those numbers were heavily manipulated.

The official said 1,980 Iraqis had been killed in July and that violent deaths soared in August, to 2,890. . ."

"Services haven't improved across most of the capital — the international aid group Oxfam reported in July that only 30 percent of Iraqis have access to clean water, compared with 50 percent in 2003 — and tens of thousands of Iraqis are fleeing their homes each month in search of safety. . ."

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[The_Casual_Observer]

1. Too bad the people in Iraq can't hear how well they are doing

they are too far from Washington.