Picture Perfect
Last week Steve Verdon had great fun using graphs to show how the evil Republicans and Saudis manipulated gas prices in advance of the 2003 and 2005 national elections – his point being, of course, that we don’t have national elections in odd years, so if you see the same pricing patterns then as in even years, parsimony demands you ditch the election-manipulation theory of gas prices. This week, the Wall Street Journal’s columnbot claims, in what may prove to be the last “How come everyone is ignoring the good news from Iraq?” editorial ever, that
The current American panic, by contrast, is precisely what the insurgents intend with their surge of October violence. The Baathists and Sadrists can read the U.S. political calendar, and they’d like nothing better than to feed the perception that the violence is intractable. They want our election to be perceived as a referendum on Iraq that will speed the pace of American withdrawal.
(WSJ link via Winds of Inertia.)
The first question to ask is, “So. Is there even a surge of October violence?” Since our friends at Brookings still maintain the Iraq Index we can answer the question easily. The relevant graph is on page 22 of the PDF. The top graph shows average daily attacks by insurgents by month since June 2003. I can’t figure out an easy way to copy the graph to this site, so go look yourself. What you’ll see is that insurgent violence has displayed a ratcheting periodicity since the beginning of the occupation. The long-term trendline is up-up-up. But there’s also a strong seasonality – attack pace steadily increases from summer through fall every year. It drops sometime in the winter of every year, though never as low as the previous lull pace, then climbs again.
The pattern is especially clear in 2003 and 2005 – rising violence in September and October. The pattern is mildly broken in 2004 of all times – October is higher than September but both are lower than August. November, most of which happened after the polls closed, is higher than either.
The pattern is clear – US election off-years also show “surges” in the fall months. As with gas prices, parsimony demands a better explanation than the insurgents can read the political calendar.
I’d go so far as to say that a major reason, if not the major reason, America lost the Iraq War is this very tendency to think that “it’s all about us” – that is, the inability to conceive that the various Official Bad Guys in Iraq were acting on local, sometimes internal imperatives rather than pitching everything to an American audience.
Comment by Jonathan Goff —
October 27, 2006 @ 12:50 am
Yeah, the thought that cooler, more reasonable weather might possibly make insurgent operations easier never crossed the minds of these people, in spite of all the suggestions over the past several years to that effect. I’d imagine in a country where summer temperatures regularly get into the 120’s, that pretty *all* activity in the country slows down for a few months, and only starts ramping up again when weather gets more tolerable.
That’s what happens here in Mojave at least. I imagine that pulling off guerilla actions against a much better armed foe is probably at least as tough as what I do for my day job (designing and building rockets), so I can empathize if they slow down a bit when its so dericulously hot.
~Jon Goff
Comment by Doug T —
October 27, 2006 @ 7:23 am
Not sure exactly how it’s fallen in past years, but assuming the Islamic lunar calender isn’t too out of whack with the 365 day calender, the occurrence of Ramadan could also be an explanatory factor in fall spikes of activity.
Comment by Jim Henley —
October 27, 2006 @ 7:29 am
Ramadan just finished on Monday. Since it precesses, it would have finished in November last year, etc.
Jonathan: Curiously, insurgent activity starts to ramp up in the hot months. It’s in winter that it drops (some of the way) back down.
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
October 27, 2006 @ 8:33 am
in what may prove to be the last “How come everyone is ignoring the good news from Iraq?†editorial ever
Oh, Jim. Jim, Jim, Jim. Dear, sweet, naive Jim.
If, God forbid, Iraq melts down Rwanda style, these people are more than capable of shoving in our defeatist faces the fact that more than half the population–a majority!–hasn’t been hacked to death and bulldozed into mass graves yet, but you never hear about that do you?
Comment by Nell —
October 27, 2006 @ 9:43 am
Re: Iraq weather and attack patterns. The issue isn’t only temperature, but clear days vs. storms. Storms involve a lot of sand movement — very difficult to pull off movement, much less anything requiring visibility. (On the plus side: US air advantage nullified.) Winter = storms. February and March have been the low months for attacks and U.S./coalition casualties.
Summer nights are highly suitable for guerrilla logistics, and autumn is ideal: mostly clear, but more humanly bearable temps. Spring is okay for temps, but storminess can be a problem.
Comment by fester —
October 27, 2006 @ 9:53 am
Jim — I’ve grabbed images from Brookings and I just use image select, copy, and paste to Paint, crop and save and then credit Brookings. Too much effort too often, but effective.
As far as patterns, yeah, I just assume a generic uptrend YoY with the occassional variance that can be explained by either Ramadan, national election day or major US initiated house to house fighting.