Yesterday marked three months since the Iraqi security forces assumed control of security, within their cities, as U.S. combat forces withdrew in accordance with the security agreement. And overall the transition has progressed well so far.
Over the past three months, we've seen incidents in Iraq remain at levels equal to the early part of 2003.
If our incident statistics are down to levels from early 2003, we are doing much better than in early 2003. The reason is that we changed how we measured incidents in April 2004. Prior to that point we didn't count all attacks. My impression is that we only counted attacks that inflicted casualties. So if we measured attacks the way we do now, spring 2003 attacks would be higher by some amount, making incident levels today less than early 2003 when the insurgency was barely beginning.
I don't know why our military doesn't explain this--unless we've somehow statistically adjusted our counts to make pre-April 2003 stats consistent with those compiled since then.
