War can't be fully expressed by metrics, so some humility is always called for when trying to do a numerical analysis of the situation in Iraq. That said, the number of civilians killed does seem like a fairly straightforward measure of security. Even so, there's still controversies.
War supporters often compare the months before the surge, like Dec '06 versus months when the surge is in full force, like Aug '07. War critics tend to point out that there's a consistent dip in violence in August since it's so frakking hot. Not surprisingly Aug '06 versus Aug '07 looks a lot worse than Dec '06 versus Dec '07.
However, all that assumes we can trust the numbers coming from the military in the first place. Ilan Goldberg of the National Security Network makes a solid case that we can't. The graph below shows differing numbers reported for the exact same dates in four different military quarterly reports.
Essentially, by changing the definition of sectarian killings, the numbers can be shifted up or down. Since these numbers are being used for comparative purposes, the Pentagon has an interest in shifting the numbers up for the pre-surge period so the surge looks better by comparison. Hence anomaly B. For full details, see the Goldberg article linked above.
This sort of problem isn't surprising since we're not doing any sort of systematic civilian casualty tracking. The military is hesitant to do it because of the risk of bad publicity and the poor showing body count figures made in Vietnam. Trouble is, as a co-worker of mine pointed out, other people still make their best guess. Moreover, civilian casualties are certainly one of the top three metrics for judging success in a counter-insurgency. So until we get some transparency in these numbers, we should rely on metrics that can be verified. And until we actually get as real about tracking the number of people killed as we do tracking supplies and logistics, we're putting political considerations above successful strategy.
[Addendum: I meant internal Pentagon logistics. Once stuff gets out to the contractors or the Iraqi Army/Police tracking falls apart. That said, at least we know how many rifles or dollars went missing. This is a warzone, I don't expect the military to be able to attribute causes to all the dead or missing, or to know whether they were terrorists, insurgents, or civilians. But we should be able to better nail down the number of dead.]
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