A Reminder
With the Rove-a-palooza getting all the HAF extreme-left blogheads all a-twitter and foaming at the mouth for a chink in the Bushco armor (like myself), it's important not to get too sucked up in this inside-baseballish political fantasy league game (like myself). While we continue to focus on the total number of American troop casualities, we also need to remember what this conflict is inflicting upon the Iraqi populace. The NYTimes has an article today that gives some numbers to the death toll on the citizenry:

Iraqi civilians and police officers died at a rate of more than 800 a month between August and May, according to figures released in June by the Interior Ministry. In response to questions from The New York Times, the ministry said that 8,175 Iraqis were killed by insurgents in the 10 months that ended May 31. The ministry did not give detailed figures for the months before August 2004, nor did it provide a breakdown of the figures, which do not include either Iraqi soldiers or civilians killed during American military operations. [...] The figures, released by e-mail through an American official after multiple requests, are a significant milestone, for while the Iraqi government tallies Iraqi deaths, figures on the overall totals have been tightly guarded. But the numbers do not account for civilian deaths caused by American and Iraqi soldiers in military offensives, at checkpoints or on raids. [...] Obtaining tallies of Iraqi dead has always been difficult, in part because they have not always been compiled systematically. For some time after the 2003 invasion, the Health Ministry released daily counts that were cobbled together mostly from figures provided by hospitals. But last year, when the numbers began to rise, the ministry stopped releasing even those tallies publicly, and provided classified copies to the government.

But never fear--I'll get back to the Rove-a-palooza a little later this evening.