"November saw fewer attacks than any month since 2003," Austin said at a news conference in the U.S.-protected Green Zone. "We have significantly degraded al-Qaida's ability to plan, to resource and to capitalize on ruthless attacks on the Iraqi people."
This underestimates the progress we've made. As I've noted before, comparing attack statistics before and after April 2004 doesn't work because in April we began to use a more expansive definition of "attack." Before then, I'm pretty sure that an attack on US forces only counted if we suffered casualties. Now we count every incident including IEDs found by our troops before they detonate.
If attacks in 2003 were counted as we count them now, we'd be way lower now than back then. We can hardly go back to May 2003 to March 2004 and redo those statistics. But it would be interesting to recalculate our attack counts from April 2004 and forward using criteria from early in the war just to compare the trend using a constant standard.
We may have won the war. But we will only know for sure looking back.
