The Saddam Effect. Or Not.

Here's two reports about the effect of Saddam's capture on insurgency in Iraq.

The first, from the Washington Times, says "that guerrilla attacks [in Baghdad] have dropped sharply since the Dec. 13 capture of Saddam Hussein."

The second, from Knight-Ridder via the San Jose Mercury News, says "Saddam Hussein's capture three weeks ago has not slowed the anti-American insurgency in Iraq, which now seems more entrenched than ever, according to a review of recent attacks and interviews with U.S. and Iraqi officials."

Now that that's all cleared up, we can really enjoy the weekend's football games.

Comments

[Just me]

Interesting. Both articles cite General Dempsey. In the first article, he very clearly gives his opinion that the attacks have gone down. Maybe the reporter who wrote the second article didn't hear that part.

[Just you]

Or maybe he did some additional reporting instead of simply accepting everything officials told him.

[Justice]

Or maybe the effect doesn't happen overnight.

[Ruthless]

Did anyone else read about how many US military snipers over there are beginning to be effective?
Maybe that is concurrent with the capture of Saddam.
I'm still negative on Bush for the 2004 election because the war on terror will be as effective as the war on drugs. My trouble is who, on the national scene can put it like that?

[Ron Hardin]

The war on drugs' failure is structural: the war on drugs makes drugs more profitable. The war on terrorism makes terrorism less profitable, unless we go back to acquiescence to demands.

[Phil]

Given each of those papers' traditionally-perceived (and in the Times' case, flat-out obvious) political biases, it's surprising that anyone would find the disparity surprising.

[Ruthless]

Ron Hardin,
I'm afraid you're wrong.
To a potential terrorist, spiritual reward for being a martyr is rising plus the financial reward to survivors is rising. (In other words, they're getting a larger life insurance policy.) Keep in mind, technology makes fewer and fewer terrorists more and more dangerous.
The way to combat terrorism is to remove the motivation for terrorism. Is Bush doing that? Hah!

[Ruthless]

continuing...
It's like the difference between a bug-zapper and the methods of professional pest eliminators.
Bush is just nurturing the good old American bug-zapper mentality.

[joe]

From the Times story: "After suffering a month-high toll of 83 deaths in November, the U.S. military reported fewer than half that number ? 38 ? in December."

Perhaps the insurgents are selecting Iraqi or international targets instead of American ones - no figures are provided for total number of attacks, or total number of attack deaths, just figures for American troops.

This would fit in with a scenario in which the capture of Saddam has cut down on Ba'athist activity, while encouraging jihadists who didn't want to be fighting for Saddam.

[Andrew]

The "success" of the insurgency has been to stay of the intellegence radar screen-- but this has been at a price.
I am impressed at how little it resembles any guerilla-political movement: no platform; no iconic leaders (now that not only Saddam, but Aziz is talking; no regular attempt to communicate with either the Iraqi people or the world (even al-Qaida does more)...where is the future in that?

[steve]

Ruthless: "The way to combat terrorism is to remove the motivation for terrorism. "

And what would constitute removing the motivation for terrorism? Elimination of the State of Israel? Abandonment of our entire presence in the Middle East? Replacement of Western Culture with Islamic Culture? Making women cover up their bodies? Giving up their jobs? Forgetting their education?

[Kevin Carson]

Just You,

"Or maybe he did some additional reporting instead of simply accepting everything officials told him."

That's the worst thing a journalist can do these days:

"Pentagon to Washington Post Reporter Ricks: Get Lost"
http://washingtonian.com/inwashington/buzz/tomricks.html

"In his more than two decades covering the military, Ricks has developed many sources, from brass to grunts. This, according to the current Pentagon, is a problem.

"The Pentagon?s letter of complaint to Post executive editor Leonard Downie had language charging that Ricks casts his net as widely as possible and e-mails many people.

"Details of the complaints were hard to come by. One Pentagon official said in private that Ricks did not give enough credence to official, on-the-record comments that ran counter to the angle of his stories."

[Andrew]

Steve--

You forgot about giving every chap in the Arab world a good, high-paying, family-man type job. President Dean will allocate the money out of Washington and turn it over to Koffi Annan...who in turn, will devolve the task on France. Sound good?

[Dan]

Or maybe he did some additional reporting instead of simply accepting everything officials told him.

If he did, the additional reporting didn't make it into the article. Lasseter claims "U.S. and Iraqi officials" as saying that the insurgency is "more entrenched than ever", but fails to cite even a single source making any such claim.

The closest he comes to backing up the assertion with hard data is by observing that eleven Americans were killed in the two weeks preceding Hussein's capture, compared to fourteen after. That's a bit like observing that the last two weeks were colder than the two weeks before them, and concluding that global warming is a hoax and a new ice age is upon us. The data sample is too small to make accurate inferences from at this point.

[Ruthless]

"And what would constitute removing the motivation for terrorism? Elimination of the State of Israel? Abandonment of our entire presence in the Middle East? Replacement of Western Culture with Islamic Culture? Making women cover up their bodies? Giving up their jobs? Forgetting their education?"

Steve,
I'll answer equally unrealistically, but giving the right direction:
Get governments completely out of the equation. End all foreign "aid." Stop obsessing about the oil which is safe underground and will remain so regardless of what happens on the surface. Have confidence in the invisible hand which will put that oil into the world market.
Open US borders. End restrictions preventing ethnic groups in the US from militarily helping their ethnic group in its region of origin.
As to your final point about education: if my plan were adopted, that would be the "mother of all education."

Anarchy is your friend.

[DFH]

A more simple approach to combating terrorists: Kill them.

[Ruthless]

DFH,
Being Ruthless and all, I hear you boy, howdy.
Unfortunately terrorists are like potato chips in the Jay Leno commercial:
Go ahead. Kill us. We'll make more!

[Douglas Fletcher]

I can't know everything that's happening in Iraq, but it does seem like Saddam's capture has increased the amount of bullshit coming out of Howard Dean's mouth.

[Jack]

I make no claim as to whether attacks are increasing or decreasing in frequency, but comparing deaths in November versus deaths in December isn't particularly useful since the November death count was artificially inflated by the loss of several helicopters. If you factored out those deaths, you'd have a better comparison.

[rst]

And what would constitute removing the motivation for terrorism?

"Turn-ons include baklavah, falling burquas, and the destruction of Israel and America."

They don't even do it for God, they do it for the virgins, which is admittedly a pretty solid motivating factor. Were I to exort some young fools to die for this concept of "Allah," I'd tell them that there was mad pussy waiting for them on the other side, then watch them go off like so many lemmings to useless ends.

American foreign policy is not the cause of terrorism. American foreign policy is an excuse. Nothing forced them into what they do, any more than we were forced into an Iraq war. We could probably have done it another way, but we chose this path.

[Don]

Military action worked with the Assassins, historical Islamic terrorists. It will also work with our current crop of terrorists, if properly applied.

Withdrawing from the Middle East and engaging in free trade will not solve the immediate terrorist problem. Indeed, free trade is a powerfull threat to Islamic fundamentalism, and is no doubt one of the reasons Bin Laden et al hate us.

[Don]

"The "Saddam" of Christianity, Jesus, was taken out early in the history of Christianity."

Of course, Jesus had a message that appears to have resonated with millions of people over the last 2,000 years.

Saddam's "message" was power for him & his sons. Saddam's message dies with him & his sons.

Even the likes of Lenin, Hitler, and Pol Pot appear to have a longer lasting "message" than Saddam. It would be more appropriate to compare Saddam to some dead & forgotten despot, but that would contradict your point, wouldn't it?

[Dan]

Jack,

Checka dictionary. Note that "statistics" is not defined as "the art of making your dipshit beliefs seem scientific by listing lots of numbers".

You cannot factor out the helicopter deaths, period. Doing so invalidates your "study".

End of story.

[thoreau]

Dan-

You have a point, but there is something to be said for factoring out "outliers" deemed anomalous.

Speaking as a physicist who also studied economics as an undergrad, statistics isn't about "This is THE right way to analyze data." Statistics is about laying your cards on the table and saying "If we do this analysis (with a precise description given or cited), this is the result." You look at the data, you apply your tools, you specify what those tools are, and then people who understand how those tools are try to understand the various pictures painted by different tools and square them away with other measurements, data sets, observations, logical arguments, etc.

In other words, statistics isn't some sort of dream machine that takes data and always tells you exactly what sort of analysis is appropriate. It's just a set of tools that search for patterns in measurements and quantify the expected error.

Personally, I think it's worth reporting both the total number of casualties and the number of attacks. If the number of attacks drops but their deadliness increases substantially, then a declining number of attacks is not a good sign. If the total number of attacks drops slightly and the lethality of the attacks increases only slightly (e.g. go from an average of 2 fatalities per attack to 2.2 casualties per attack) then an aggregate increase in fatalities may not be such a bad sign.

[Jimbo Jones]

Nah, Douglas. The amount of bullshit coming out of Howard Dean's mouth was already infinite.

[Jack]

Dan, if you go back and read the blog post, the question is whether the frequency of attacks is decreasing or increasing. Comparing the raw number of casualties per month is not the best measure of that. Here's an example even your bloodlust addled brain can follow:

In month X, 30 American troops are killed in attacks by Iraqi guerillas, while in month Y, 25 American troops are killed. Superficially, it appears that attacks have decreased, since there were fewer troops killed. However, if you investigate and find that in month X, two helicopters were shot down, killing 15 troops in each case, while in month Y the 25 troops were all killed in separate incidents, that would indicate an increase in the frequency of (successful) attacks.

Moving away from the hypothetical, since attacks other than shooting down loaded helicopters rarely kill more than one or two Americans, excluding those "high point value" attacks as statistical outliers should give a more accurate sense of the frequency of attacks in general.

This page (http://antiwar.com/ewens/list.html) lists 81 US military personnel killed in November and 41 killed in December. 40 of the November dead resulted from helicopter shootdowns. Excluding those, it appears that the frequency of attacks remained roughly the same, assuming that the Iraqi resistance had the same kill-per-attack ratio in December as in November and that the rate of deaths due to accidents remained constant.

To put it another way, what if in February no Americans are killed on the ground at all, but the Iraqis somehow shoot down a loaded C-141 as it approaches Baghdad, killing 120 Americans (making it the highest single month casualty total for the war). Are you suddenly going to lament that the war is going *worse* for the US simply because of the jump in bodycount?

[Dan]

The "Saddam" of Christianity, Jesus, was taken out early in the history of Christianity.

The "Saddam" of Christianity would be the Emperor Constantine, who made Christianity the official religion of Rome. Although that's a better parallel for Iran or Palestine than it is for Iraq.

Also, there wasn't any Christianity, in any sense we'd recognize today, until well after Jesus' supposed death and resurrection. If you believe the Bible, then Jesus *had* to die -- and if you don't believe the Bible, there's basically no evidence that the whole thing ever happened at all.

Nero had Bush's terrorist "bug-zapper" mentality toward Christians.

If Bush had the same attitude towards terrorists that Nero had towards Christians, we would either currently be at war with Syria, Iran, Saudia Arabia, and Egypt, or would have Marines inspecting the smoking rubble of the aforementioned nations' cities. The Romans didn't screw around when it came to threats to their authority.

Was it an effective policy over the long haul?

First of all, the evidence that Christians were persecuted en masse by the Romans is, at best, shaky. Most of the accounts were written by later, Christian, historians. But, assuming you accept the stories:

Secondly, Nero lacked our technological capabilities. 🙂

Thirdly, Nero was VERY effective in one respect: he made it impossible for Christians to openly practice their faith so long as Rome's anti-Christian policy continued. The modern-day parallel would be that Bush's "Nero-like" "bug-zapper" policy will prevent terrorists from practicing terrorism. I'll settle for that. They can curse and plot in the privacy of their own homes all they want to; it's when they start "publically practicing their faith" by killing other people that I start to have a problem with them.

Most importantly, it wasn't a policy at all over "the long haul". Most Roman emperors ignored Christianity, which is why it was able to grow and prosper. It was one of the two largest religions in Rome when Constantine made it the official religion of the Roman Empire (had Constatine picked another religion, it's a safe bet that Christianity would be as dead as Mithraism and Isis-worship are today). So, as a parallel, if President Dean adopts a policy of tolerance for terrorism, and President Clinton XVIII (elected in 2240 AD) enacts a state policy of funding support for Muslims who want to kill Americans, I would not be at all surprised if the year 2241 saw continuing problems with Islamic terrorism.

[Harry]

Jimbo Jones....re: does shooting down a C-130 with 120 dead show that the war is going *worse*

Yes it does for two reasons: It shows that they are becoming more capable (they haven't done it yet) and the perception back home will be one of "what the hell is going on out there." As a viet nam veteren, I can remember how the news affected our countries citizens.

[Bill]

Why, why, does anyone read the Mercury News (except if looking for a tech job)!? I live in SF, read many Bay Area papers, and no "mainstream" paper, except for maybe the Fangxaminer, is worse than the Mercury News when it comes to honest journalism. Knight-Ridder reminds me of the The Fountainhead's Gail Wynand newspaper empire (except Knight-Ridder is not as influential). Can you say "yellow"?

[Citizen]

Dan, I think that's known as "stretching the cheese analogy."

[Don]

"Personally, I think it's worth reporting both the total number of casualties and the number of attacks. If the number of attacks drops but their deadliness increases substantially, then a declining number of attacks is not a good sign. . . ."

Fewer, more effective attacks might indicate a small but professional (or experienced) cadre of terrorists. On the other hand, more less effective attacks might indicate a larger number of poorly trained terrorists.

[Ruthless]

The "Saddam" of Christianity, Jesus, was taken out early in the history of Christianity.

Nero had Bush's terrorist "bug-zapper" mentality toward Christians.
Was it an effective policy over the long haul?

[Jack]

Harry... Did you actually *read* the hypothetical I posed to Dan in the final paragraph? I absolutely oppose the war on Iraq, but even I would argue that the situation was improving for the occupation if the Iraqis only carried out one successful attack in a month, no matter how many Americans were killed in it.

[R. C. Dean]

Well, that's a first. I don't think I've ever heard anyone equate Saddam with Jesus.

[John Hood]

I supported the campaign in Iraq, but I still think statistical assertions about the benefits of Saddam's capture are idiotic. Look, we are talking about (in military terms) a very small number of casualties from month to month. Modest changes in these numbers aren't meaningful. It's much like those ridiculously hyped increases in risk of cancer from exposure to industrial chemicals -- ridiculously hyped because the risk starts out so low that even "large" changes leave the risk very, very small.

Moreover, success against the Ba'athist and Islamist insurgency in Iraq may lead to a month of two of higher U.S. casualties, as least to the extent that the coalition identifies caches and cells and assaults them. Weekly or monthly body counts have always been and remain a silly way to measure the efffectiveness of a military campaign, at least at the magnitudes we are talking about.

(Of course, every individual life lost in tragic in and of itself, including those Iraqis lives that would have been lost in the absence of our military action).

[Sebastian]

Ruthless,

You're answer to the terrorism problem is typical anarcho-libertarian idealism. This isn't going to work in practice. The only way you're going to get rid of terrorism is to kill as many of them as you can, while attempting to eliminate the conditions in which terrorism is allowed to thrive. Will nation building succeed in Iraq? Maybe, maybe not. It's hard to say at this point. But it's worth trying. The status quo definitely wasn't doing anything for us.

We didn't get rid of nazism by free trade and open borders. We got rid of nasism by invading Europe, killing nazis, and afterwards, helping the Europeans rebuild their society so this kind of thing wouldn't happen again. By in large, it seems to have worked pretty well. I don't think France is all that worried about another German invasion these days.

Anarchy isn't a recipe for a complex, peaceful and productive society, it's a recipe for... well... anarchy. I can't speak for everyone, but I don't really feel like having to worry about the folks in the next village coming to pillage mine. It's nice to think anarchy would be a panacea, but given human nature, it's likely to be a nightmare. Government isn't the only thing that can take away freedom.

[Dan]

Unfortunately terrorists are like potato chips in the Jay Leno commercial:
Go ahead. Kill us. We'll make more!

That logic only works if one or more new terrorists appear to replace each old terrorist killed. But eventually you run out of mentally unbalanced young men and women to recruit, and the replacement rate drops to near zero. This is why we aren't still fighting Nazi guerillas in the German countryside.

I suppose it's hypothetically possible that ALL of the Muslims in the world are potential terorists, and we'll end up killing a billion people in self-defense. I can live with that, if it comes to it. Realistically, though, the overwhelming majority of Muslims, like the overwhelming majority of other people, just want to live in peace and raise families, and thus will not "go bad".

[TM Lutas]

Ruthless - The way to remove the motivation for terrorism is twofold:

1. Lessen the dysfunctional nature of terrorist producing societies
2. Create an atmosphere were moderate imams dominate and make it clear that terrorism is hirabah (banditry) not jihad (holy war).

Casualty information, dead and wounded, US and international can be found at
http://lunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx

[Dan]

comparing deaths in November versus deaths in December isn't particularly useful since the November death count was artificially inflated by the loss of several helicopters.

The post-Saddam death count is zero, if you discount the fact that it was "artificially inflated" by the deaths of fourteen Americans.

Seriously, though: "artifically inflated"? The dead bodies are real, and they really were American troops in life. What's "artificial" about that?

If you factored out those deaths, you'd have a better comparison.

No, you wouldn't. The only reason for factoring them out is if you wanted to track a statistic OTHER than "US troops killed per month", such as "US troops killed by roadside bombs" or "US troops killed in car crashes".

[Don]

Steve wrote: "And what would constitute removing the motivation for terrorism? Elimination of the State of Israel? Abandonment of our entire presence in the Middle East? Replacement of Western Culture with Islamic Culture? Making women cover up their bodies? Giving up their jobs? Forgetting their education?"

Which version of Islam? Whichever isn't dominant won 't be happy . . .

[rst]

(Of course, every individual life lost in tragic in and of itself, including those Iraqis lives that would have been lost in the absence of our military action).

Yeah dude. We're saving 5,000 Iraqi kids under five per day.

Thanks, Madeleine.

[Rebecca]

Hmm. Both articles quoted Dempsey, but used his quotes to answer different questions. What we can know from these two articles is (1) that some guy named Dempsey is in Iraq; (2) that people are dying in terrorist attacks in Iraq.

Why are we asking, three weeks after Saddam's capture, if Saddam's capture had any effect, when the administration and the military leadership in Iraq both cautioned not to expect any sudden changes in the situation in Iraq? Perhaps that would be "paying too much heed" to what the officials say.

Given that reporters have - for months - been giving the worst possible impression of the situation in Iraq, and given that many Iraqis have supported what America is doing up to this point, I'm inclined to view defeatist reporting with due caution.

[Don]

From my perspective, the worst aspect to the current situation in Iraq is that a large number of American soldiers are stationed in Iraq as occupation troops. This is a mission they don't want and find difficult, but given everything it is something that can't be avoided.

Our actual losses after the war's end have been low. And yes, the war IS over.