Who our troops are and what they’re doing
Bookworm on Sep 16 2007 at 5:47 pm | Filed under: Iraq, Military
One of my favorite milblogs is Acute Politics, because Teflon Don, the soldier who writes it, has the soul of a poet. That is, he manages to combine astute on-the-ground observations about military life in Iraq with really beautiful writing. I see a shift coming, though, because Teflon Don is heading home. In his last post from the Middle East, he details his task force’s accomplishments and they are impressive:
Missions Performed - 647
Improvised Explosive Devices Reduced - 458
Kilometers Traveled - 51135
The remainder of the post explains a bit more about what those numbers means, as well as the sacrifices his task force made to achieve those ends. The post is a good reminder of the people behind every one of those statistics bandied about in Congress. Real people take real risks to try to make things better for Americans in Iraq, for Iraqis in Iraq and, by extension, for those of us at home, who take shelter behind our forces.
I’ll look forward to seeing (a) whether Teflon Don keeps his post going when he’s stateside and (b) what he’ll write about if he does.
Congratulations on a job well done, TD, and welcome home!
UPDATE: Apparently Harry Reid hasn’t been reading Teflon Don’s blog, because he claims that over one million people have died in Iraq, with a fifth of those deaths from car bombs. Even the MSM hasn’t reported numbers like that. Denis Keohane delves into the obvious problems behind Harry’s numbers.
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UPDATE: Apparently Harry Reid hasn’t been reading Teflon Don’s blog, because he claims that over one million people have died in Iraq, with a fifth of those deaths from car bombs. Even the MSM hasn’t reported numbers like that. Denis Keohane delves into the obvious problems behind Harry’s numbers.- Book
I read the “one million dead” estimate in the Los Angeles Times, which, I believe, is part of the mainstream media.
Published on Friday, September 14, 2007 by the Los Angeles Times
Poll: Civilian Death Toll in Iraq May Top 1 Million
by Tina Susman
And, they’re not Harry Reid’s numbers. They come from a Brittish polling company.
These extreme numbers have been debunked over and over in the context of a Lancet article that also presented vastly inflated numbers. These British publications have ideological bones to pick and use flawed data to arrive at their conclusions.
Incidentally, the Keohane article to which I linked points to some of those flaws, so I did know where Reid got the numbers. I just think he’s either credulous, naive or agenda driven to accept them as true.