President Bush Gives Quantitative Metric Of Succss In Iraq
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President Bush gave a hugely important speech today to a gathering at the Veterans Of Foreign Wars National Convention, and this passage made us sit up and take notice.
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An average of 1,500 bad guys a month have been killed or captured since January, or roughly 12,000 bad guys year to date. That certainly is a remarkable achievement. But there are definite questions that have to be answered in order to determine how strong of a metric of success this is.
Do we have any intelligence of how many foreign fighters or insurgents there were in Iraq in January? Do we have any reasonable estimate as to their numbers now? Have the coalition and Iraqi forces been able to gain control over the borders in order to stem the flow of foreign fighters coming into Iraq? Do we have any idea of the ratio of foreign fighers to Iraqi insurgents now as opposed to in January?
The White House should be encouraged to release more of this kind of information, and answer some of the natural follow up questions in order to give the American people a truer picture of how the war in Iraq is progressing, rather than let the mainstream media just trickle U.S. body counts night in and night out. The more Americans hear about what is really going on, the more likely they are to disregard the defeatist spin being fed to them by Democrats in Congress and in MSM.
Professor LS made an analysis a while ago that is close to what the President said today about the average numbers of terrorists who are killed and captured every month. I also believe that the President is conservative in his estimate because many of the injured terrorists who are carried out of the battlefield by their fleeing comrades will eventually die for lack of proper medical care (LS analysis).
From his speech;
"Do we have any intelligence of how many foreign fighters or insurgents there were in Iraq in January? Do we have any reasonable estimate as to their numbers now? Have the coalition and Iraqi forces been able to gain control over the borders in order to stem the flow of foreign fighters coming into Iraq? Do we have any idea of the ratio of foreign fighers to Iraqi insurgents now as opposed to in January? "
It was quite impressive to see Senators Levins and Warner return from Iraq and state on the Sunday talk show that they saw good results of "the Surge".
Now I wish the President would say this;
"Do we have any intelligence of how many terrorists or insurgents there were in Mexico in January? Do we have any reasonable estimate as to their numbers now? Have the government and American forces been able to gain control over the borders in order to stem the flow of foreigners and illegals coming into America? Do we have any idea of the ratio of terrorists to illegals invading now as opposed to in January?"