Violence in Iraq down 70% since June '07

No surprise to readers of Kuru Lounge given that I have linked to "Back Talk" which has done an excellent job in tracking this stuff (as do a lot of the other sites in my blogroll but Back Talk has lots of pretty graphs and I like pretty graphs). What is surprising is Reuters is reporting it.

Actually if the trend in decreasing violence continues Oct should have less than 650 civilian casualties which would make that the lowest level since Feb '06.

Unfortunately I still can't help feeling that someone is planning something like another attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra. Let's just hope we can prevent it.

One thing does bother me about this article, and actually most article that have addressed this trend:

While the leaders have failed to agree on key laws aimed at reconciling the country's warring sects, the troop buildup has succeeded in quelling violence.

This makes it sound like the Iraqis were just supposed to say "Oh, Violence dropped let's be friends now". Use a little common sense people, I am not happy with the rate of progress on reconciliation either but I recognize that issues like this take a little time to resolve.

h/t Ace

Iraq, War, Media