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Tomgram: The Numbers Surge in Iraq

Tomgram: The Numbers Surge in Iraq: "Now, Americans are theoretically waiting for the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, to 'report' to Congress in September on the 'progress' of the President's surge strategy. But there really is no reason to wait for September. An interim report -- 'Iraq by the numbers' -- can be prepared now (as it could have been prepared last month, or last year). The trajectory of horror in Iraq has long been clear; the fact that the U.S. military is a motor driving the Iraqi cataclysm has been no less clear for years now. So here is my own early version of the 'September Report.'
A caveat about numbers: In the bloody chaos that is Iraq, as tens of thousands die or are wounded, as millions uproot themselves or are uprooted, and as the influence of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's national government remains largely confined to the four-square mile fortified Green Zone in the Iraqi capital, numbers, even as they pour out of that hemorrhaging land, are eternally up for grabs. There is no way most of them can be accurate. They are, at best, a set of approximate notations in a nightmare that is beyond measurement.
Here, nonetheless, is an attempt to tell a little of the Iraqi story by those numbers: "

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