At least 1,227 Iraqi civilians were killed in June along with 190 policemen and 31 soldiers, an officer at the Iraqi Interior Ministry's operations room said. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the figures.
That represented a 36 percent drop from the ministry's May figures — 1,949 civilian deaths along with 127 policemen and 47 soldiers.
June's figures were the lowest monthly tally this year.
One thing should be evident is that Iraqi security forces are dying for a free Iraq. It is unfair to accuse them of not stepping up and charging they are letting our troops die for them.
Second, there is a floor below which civilian casualties can't drop and in the short run we don't want them to drop. That is, I've read that a third of Iraq's "civilian" casualties are actually insurgents or terrorists.
So let's say that in May of the nearly 2000 civilian casualties, 650 were terrorists. That means that 1350 actual innocent civilians died.
In June, with an offensive going on, let's assume that we killed the same number of enemy--650. We've probably killed more but let's be conservative. This means that 600 actual civilians died in June. That's actually a 56% reduction in civilian casualties in one month.
It also means that "civilian" casualties of less than 600 per month might not be possible even if no innocent civilians are being killed and the enemy still resists. So just ripping apart the enemy will still look liked fairly steady casualties even if civilians are actually perfectly safe.
Of course, this assumes that enemy casualties aren't stripped out of the official death toll. But given the difficulty of figuring out if a dead body brought to the morgue in civilian clothing is a terrorist, insurgent, or poor guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, I imagine this is an inclusive number.
Not only are civilian casualties the wrong metric, it is a metric tough to really define.
