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I think I know the answer, LS, but do your numbers include:

1. Ex-Jihadists in Somalia, Ethiopia, etc?
2. Ex-Jihadists inside Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, etc?
3. Ex-Jihadist-on-Ex-Jihadist casualties?
4. Vigilante justice creating ex-Jihadists within Iraq?
5. Ex-Jihadists in such “remote” places as the Phillipines?

This is a global war, and I believe that even your very carefully drawn numbers understate the extraordinary progress that has been made.

Add to this the remarkable advances on many other fronts, including shutting down bank accounts, cutting off communications, restricting travel/movement, sowing dissension within the ranks, and so forth. I’m also certain that we are yanking their chains in ways that saps like me just can’t even imagine. At this point, the jihadist’s life must be full not only of abject misery but also perpetual panic, incoherence, confusion, and all manner of other adjectives.

It must be the case — it must — that we are just beating the crap out of these losers.

Decades from now, when definitive histories of this era are finally written, I believe that fighting the war in Iraq has been like shooting fish in a barrel; and that the sort of shock and awe that defined the original invasion in fact carried through and became standard operating procedure.

I would be interested, LS, in even a wild conjecture on your part for a “global” set of numbers of jihadists killed, wounded, captured, etc.

And then I would remind you and others that it was actually not that long ago that a million or more men in Iraq and Iran killed each other in a decade-long war. Most of those men would be in their 30s, 40s, and 50s now, had they survived. But they are extinguished, as are another million or two men and women killed subsequently by the brutal regimes in those two countries.

There is a reason why Islam accommodates polygamy. There is a dire shortage of males in many regions throughout the Middle East.

It is simply breathtaking to contemplate the extent to which the Arab world is hell-bent on its own destruction.

19,000 insurgents killed in Iraq since 2003! 19,000! The level of cluelessness is so pathetic it is laughable.