SEPTEMBER FATALITIES IN IRAQ….A couple of my critics have emailed to wonder why I’ve been so quiet about the dramatic reduction in civilian casualties in Iraq last month. 
Obviously this is good news, and I hope it represents the start of a long-term trend. If Anbar stays quiet, the Mahdi Army continues to stand down, and we’re able to pacify more neighborhoods in Baghdad without losing control of the ones that were the initial targets of the surge, it might be.
However, as I’ve said a few times before (here, here, and here, for example) I don’t blog much about day-to-day activity in Iraq because it really doesn’t do any good to get excited about every quiet week or depressed about every major attack. I got sucked into casualty blogging for a couple of weeks in late August, but then stopped. What’s important is political and institutional progress, and on that score the surge simply doesn’t seem to be accomplishing anything. Sectarian cleansing continues to be vicious, Kirkuk is still a timebomb, intra-Shiite fighting in Basra is heating up, refugees are fleeing the country at staggering rates, the Iraqi infrastructure is in ruins, the Iraqi security forces are a sectarian nightmare, and Maliki simply doesn’t have the leverage to make progress on any of Iraq’s critical political issues.
Bottom line: I’ll continue to blog about underlying dynamics in Iraq, but not much about short-term violence, which has a habit of changing dramatically from week to week. But maybe I’ll recap the numbers once a month from now on. That seems frequent enough to give us an idea of what’s happening on the ground without overemphasizing either fleeting successes or fleeting failures.
