Iraq Body Count: "Surge" project terminated for lack of interest?

The folks over at "Iraq Body Count" started a project intended to gauge the effectiveness of the "surge" strategy. In the words of the project sub-heading:

What effect is the increase in US troop deployment to Baghdad having on violence against civilians?

Though I'd visited IBC a few times to take a look at their figures, I had not run across this page before. I was intrigued to see that it ran up through September and no further.

From a sidebar:

The stated purpose of the US military 'surge' begun in February 2007 (Operation Fardh al-Qanoon) was to provide security for the civilian population, especially in Baghdad, and contain its sectarian violence.

The trend in violent deaths is the most direct indicator of population security.

The numbers shown reflected a decrease in violent deaths. But IBC was concerned that readers not draw the wrong conclusion. From a "Note for the second and third week of September, 2007":

These charts sometimes indicate a modest improvement in the security situation for ordinary Iraqis post-surge, and this is not disputed. But these charts will tend to under-represent reported violence for the more recent periods, for the reasons stated above. The observed downward trend in these charts will likely become less marked as data still in the pipeline is added (see Recent Events for as yet unprocessed data).

Thus, even a trend showing an improved security situation may not reflect an improving security situation since the figures run somewhat behind.

Fortunately, now that November has arrived we can take the September figures as fairly stable, even if we might register some surprise that IBC ceased its interest in the trend of violence after September.

Please note that IBC acknowledged that the aim of the surge was primarily to quell violence in Baghdad. I prepared a graph based on the combined numbers of shooting and bomb deaths in Baghdad as provided by IBC (I did the addition in my head, so accuracy is not absolutely guaranteed).

Click to enlarge, and cut me a break on the weak attempt to change the color of the first two bars.

In spite of the hints that IBC intended to highlight the failure of the surge (that is, the apparent termination of the project in September as well as the cautionary notes), the numbers appear to unequivocally support the success of the surge (under the assumption that compilation of the graph remained dynamic so as to make September numbers reasonably comparable to July numbers).

Here is a graph showing the combined numbers (Baghdad and the remainder of Iraq, shooting and bomb deaths combined):



It tells pretty much the same story: a downward trend for violent deaths.

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