[Terror] Three Disturbing Thoughts on Mosul

First. Heard some talking military bobbleheads on CNN the other day. They said that in Vietnam when troops messed they took their food and dispersed, in order to minimize the number of casualties if the enemy attacked. We don't do that in Iraq they said because it would be an inefficient means of distributing food. Chalk one up to our outsourcing food services. People think that privatization leads to greater efficiency, and it probably does; but what they forget is that efficiency is not the only criterion out there.

Second. At her press conference the head of the Landstuhl Medical Center, when asked if there was anything noteworthy about the casualties coming out of Mosul, said that they were seeing more injuries to the torso; usually, the most common injuries coming out of Iraq are to the extremities. Why? Troops were not wearing personal armor while eating lunch. Brian Gifford wrote an interesting op-ed piece in the Washington Post back in November, putting Iraqi casualties in context. "To better understand the difficulty of the fighting in Iraq, consider not just the current body count but the combat intensity of previous wars. During World War II, the United States lost an average of 300 military personnel per day ... On the other hand, improved body armor, field medical procedures and medevac capabilities are allowing wounded soldiers to survive injuries that would have killed them in earlier wars. In World War II there were 1.7 wounded for every fatality, and 2.6 in Vietnam; in Iraq the ratio of wounded to killed is 7.6. This means that if our wounded today had the same chances of survival as their fathers did in Vietnam, we would probably now have more than 3,500 deaths in the Iraq war." He also points out that in terms of the number of troops we have in the field, casualties in Vietnam are only one-foruth more than Iraq. Further, says Gifford, the daily casualties have almost tripled since before the first attack on Fallujah in April (and this written back at the end of November).

Third. The language currently being used is that an insurgent infiltrated the base in Mosul wearing an Iraqi Guard uniform. Do they know this for a fact, or is it possible the suicide bomber was an Iraqi guardsman? Is the current language simply political correctness? Is it possible that some Iraqi guardsmen are not prepared to run away, but stay and blow themselves up? We know insurgents have infiltrated the Iraqi army, but this seems to ratchet up a few notches the overall messiness.

Two bits of information I would be interested in seeing. One would be a geotemporal distribution of IED incidents. We know they're increasing, but I suspect that they are not random, but strategically deployed. I'd like to see a graphic. Second, I'd like to know the number of foreign correspondents reporting out of Iraq, broken down by month and nationality. Go back 12-18 months. A while back I heard mentioned on CNN that foreign news services were pulling reporters out of Iraq, and that even some American media, like the Washington Post and CNN, were considering the same. I haven't seen any follow-up, but I have noticed fewer and fewer stories originating from Iraq. I'd like to see if there was a correlation.