Your observations really flesh out the subject.

It is my view (as opposed to having the hard and cold numbers to back it up) that much of drop in sectarian violence in Baghdad can be attributed to neighborhoods being cleansed of Sunnis and, in fewer instances, Shiites through death squads and forced migration.

All of this is dubious because there are multiple ways to calculate casualties (Marlowe rightly points out that that includes dead and wounded; as a Civil War scholar I see mistakes of this nature all the time). And then to ascertain motive is even harder. My own research into Missouri during the Civil War shows that many people get killed for BOTH political and criminal reasons. Surely that’s true in Iraq too. Insurgents can kill and torture Shi’ites AND take their money to fund future terrorist acts. And vice versa.

The other problem is that downward trends in violence might not mean as much they seem: one has to ask why numbers may have gone down. Is it because of increased US military presence? If so, it’s a temporary success but with no provable sustainability. Is it because Sunnis and Shi’ites have started to reconcile? That would be genuinely good news over the long term. Or is it because so many Baghdad neighborhoods have been cleansed of sectarian minorities that there are no minorities left to intimidate or kill? That would be the worst news. But this is the appropriate follow-up question to claims that killings have dropped.

You chide Shaun for an ellipsis, then you counter with Big Mac and claims of de-militarizing militias by taking away guns.

Both in Vietnam, and in Iraq (if you read some of the blogs by soldiers) it is just, if not far more, likely that the civilian count is alot higher because many innocents are counted as ‘insurgents’ because they are part of the collateral damage that might destroy a house or building w one true insurgent or terrorist, while 50 innocents perish. But, the military claims it got a viper’s den of 51 insurgents.

These are old tricks used by the accountants of death. Sorry, but Petraeus danced for his masters, and as with Uncle Tom Powell, it was a disgrace.

It looks to me like the trend since late last year is downward, but do fewer civilian deaths mean we are “winning?” No by itself, no. The sad fact is that partisans on both side will choose the statistic that “proves” their pre-determined point of view or intentionally obfuscate for the same reason. It’s extremely vexing to me to try to find reliable data and analysis in this politicized environment.

The reason for the difference, from the ellided material: “Petraeus’s chart was limited to numbers of dead, while the Pentagon combined the numbers of dead and wounded.”

Arguable, Petraeus metric was more precise, for most people today seem to confuse “casualties” with numbers of dead…in fact, it means both dead and wounded.

It seems we have returned to the body count obsessed Vietnam era, and McNamara metrics allowing the best and the brightest to “perfectly” understand the war via spreadsheets.

Does anyone bother citing the fact that it is insurgents, militias, AQ who are directly responsible for the vast bulk of these casualties? Or the near impossibility of accurate data collection in Iraq, especially for “civilian” deaths? All that is needed is for the dead insurgent’s friends to take away his AK-47 and – “Alakazam” – he is a civilian killed by those gun-happy American cowboys.

I anticipate yet another report in the “Lancet” between September and November 08, prior to the election, declaring how 200 percent of the population of Iraq have been killed since the invasion.

WE claim tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died since the invasion, while others have it over a million. While neither is totally accurate, history suggests the higher figure is much closer to reality.