Back to the future

Perhaps trying to keep up the feeling of post-election euphoria, a "senior military official" told CNN on Tuesday that

[t]he U.S. military faces between 13,000 and 17,000 insurgents in Iraq, the large majority of them backers of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party....

Of those, the source said 5,000 to 7,000 are considered "committed" fighters, with the rest considered "fence-sitters," criminals or "facilitators" who contribute material support or sanctuary to the guerrillas.

Just 5,000-7,000 fighters! Well, that's certainly good news! It's quite a change from the 20,000 fighters the US estimated it was facing in September. And oh my gee, it was just in November they were saying there were 3,000-5,000 in Fallujah alone! What's more, they're all just those mean old nasty Saddam supporters, not anybody who might have any sort of, you know, legitimate grievance or just might object to being invaded.

We really have made progress!

Except, well.... When the insurgency first broke out, Defense Secretary Donald Rumpled called them Baathist "dead-enders" and in December 2003, the Pentagon estimated the number of fighters (just fighters, not supporters) at, yep, 5,000. So based on what we're being told now, by their own words, after 15 more months of blood and pain we have gotten by the best interpretation precisely nowhere. And that's even if they're both honest and right. And catch the coda:

The official who provided Tuesday's estimate said the U.S. military believes it killed between 10,000 and 15,000 guerillas in combat last year - perhaps as many as 3,000 during the November push to retake the western Iraqi city of Falluja from insurgents.

So we say we've killed two to three times as many as there were to begin with and there are still at least as many as there were at the start.

Like the man said, war is "friend only to the undertaker."

STDD/GTHO