Lotsa Dead Terrorists!

One of the lessons we learned in Vietnam is that body counts are a dangerous metric. I remember those days well, seeing the numbers of Viet Cong dead ... high numbers, week after week, and they caused discouragement, not elation.

No matter how many we killed, they kept on fighting.

And for some, including this at-the-time young idiot, with the mounting numbers of Viet Cong dead, respect for our troops didn't increase, it diminished. Sorry; it was me at the time, as much as I had been different.

Scroll forward to today, when Pres. Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars (and the world):

In Iraq, our troops are taking the fight to the extremists and radicals and murderers all throughout the country. Our troops have killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists every month since January of this year.

That's 12,000 dead terrorists -- a very impressive number. I expected the number to be perhaps 500 a month.

I know, I know. The crazy left will attack the number, saying we call everyone a terrorist, there are civilians included, the numbers are trumped up, blah, blah. They will drum up an "expert" from some Soros-funded foundation to float out a lower number the mdeia will somehow accept as more credible than the president's number.

But who cares, because here's what the number tells us:

• We're killing them faster than they're killing us.
• We're killing them faster than they can kill law-abiding Iraqis.
• The jihadists will start to have recruiting problems far more severe than those our armed forces face.
  
• Some Iraqis and some foreign Islamists, if they knew this level of "martyrdom," would actually be more inclined to fight us, and
  
• That's a decision that's more likely than ever to get them killed.
• And when they too die, there will be even fewer terrorist devils left in this world.
  

The president's declaration wasn't a body count, and it doesn't need to become one. We have a number: 1,500 a month, sustainable over time and likely increasing as the surge becomes more effective.

It's a good number, because the military is a race against Washington's current Dem leadership, trying to kill enough terrorists before the Dems pull out the rug that Iraq can be stable.

The number tells us that the race, while still close, is winnable.

Harry? Harry Reid? Got anything to say? What's that? John Murtha's talking for you?

The facts on the ground in Iraq indicate that electricity is below pre-war levels (only 2 hours a day in Baghdad), oil production remains below pre-war production and at least 50% of the Iraqi population is unemployed.

12,00o dead terrorists on the one hand. Hours of electricity on the other. Defeatism, anyone?