Wednesday, December 03, 2003

Samarra

The great thing about blogs is that they offer insights into particular aspects of a story. Not the full picture, but they don't claim to.

The other day there were reports in all the papers about the army's firefight that left 46 (or 54?) guerillas dead. When I first read this, I thought the number killed was pretty high as it would have to have been a very large force for a guerilla attack. Over the past few days there have been a lot of reports claiming that the number of guerillas killed was much lower.

Reading Jason's blog on this topic sheds light on how these counts can be so wrong and why they're not a good idea to begin with.

Jim Hoagland writing in today's Washington Post goes away from the death count argument to look at the motivation of the attack and the greed and sense of entitlement among the Ba'athist guerillas.