As I’ve mentioned several times here, I begin each day by checking out the website Icasualties.org.  Even though I just spent the past weekend vacationing on the Cape - purchasing fudge, shopping for candles and shooting a 37 on the back nine - I maintained that part of my regular routine.  Icasualties.org tracks each individual act of violence in Iraq.  Run by lefties, it’s a comprehensive repository of every piece of bad news that comes from Iraq.  If a U.S. soldier commits suicide, Icasualties.org has it.  A bicycle bomber kills five people – same thing.

If you check out the site every day, you become sensitive to trends before they manifest themselves in cumulative numbers.  But it’s the numbers that matters most.  Icasualties.org gives a ruthless, comprehensive, unemotional  accounting of the situation in Iraq.  I’d like to think that every person who pontificates on Iraq is familiar with the site’s data.  I’d love to believe that our Democratic congressmen and women know what those numbers are, even while they aim to please Moveon.org and Code Pink out of political necessity.  I’d also like to believe that I’ll shoot 37 on every back 9 from now on.

So what do the number say?  As Jules Crittenden points out, Al Qaeda in Iraq is promising yet another Tet With a Turban.  There was going to be one before the surge.  There was going to be one before Petraeus came to Washington.  And now there’s going to be one to help the Iraqis ring in Ramadan.

But the numbers?  Therein lies the real story.  At the height of pre-surge anarchy, Iraq suffered roughly 3,000 civilian deaths a month because of what we’ll call the civil war. Over the previous few months, the surge reduced the monthly butcher’s bill to around 1500 civilians a month, a statistical reality that complemented the anecdotal data brought back by the Michael Yons, Bill Roggios, Jeff Emmanuels, and Bill Ardolinos of the world.

The numbers are still improving.  The last half of August was by Iraqi standards markedly superior to any time span since the civil war began.  In September, that trend has continued.  So far this month, 406 Iraqi civilians and security force members have died as a result of the civil war.  This puts September roughly on a pace to see 700 Iraqi casualties.  That’s fewer than 25% the pre-surge level of violence and will be the least since Icaualties.org started tracking this statistic in January ’06.

IT’S TRUE THAT WITHOUT SOME SORT OF political reconciliation, these gains are for naught.  Unless the Iraqis prove themselves capable of producing a government worthy of the sacrifices we’ve made, then everything we’ve done since the fall of Saddam will have turned out to be a waste of blood and treasure.  The glib line that we  should have toppled Saddam then left, leaving behind only a copy of the Federalist Papers in our wake will have more than a shred of truth to it.

Is there hope for political progress in Iraq?  Some people point to the nation’s differing ethnicities and Yugoslavia-like birth circumstances to suggest that there’s no real country there, and that the best course is to partition Iraq into three separate countries – a Sunni entity, a Shiite one and of course Kurdistan.

The people like Joe Biden who suggest such a course misunderstand the stakes in Iraq. But come now – when has Joe Biden ever understood anything? In all of history, only one country has come together not because of ethnicity or border conditions but because of shared ideals.  That country is of course the United States.  The goal of the Iraq war is to add a second country to this exclusive club.  If Iraq were partitioned along ethnic lines, it would represent a complete lack of ideological progress in the Middle East.  We know homogenous Islamic states can have relative peace and (thanks to their oil supplies) relative prosperity.  But woe to the women, homosexuals, Jews, Christians and other assorted infidels who might wander into those countries’ path.

Iraq, if we win, will be different.  It will be the first time an Islamic country has coalesced around ideas rather than ethnicity.  What are the ideals that the new Iraq will have?  Well, they won’t look precisely American.  But by regional standards, they will set new marks for progress.  Right now, unelected dictators rule over most Middle Eastern countries.  Where the people elect the leaders, the picture is even worse.  In Iran, the government has been promising genocide and conquest for almost thirty years.  In  “Palestine”, the popularly elected Hamas is cut from the same cloth.  In other words, the ideals that animate the Middle East’s Islamic countries are as follows – kill the infidels, kill the apostates, establish the Caliphate, and whine to the U.N.

Can Iraq and the Iraqis rally around a different set of ideals, one that features enough democracy, tolerance and modernity that we don’t have to worry about Iraqis crashing airliners into buildings?  We all better hope so.

Last week, Hugh spoke with our go-to radical Islam expert Walid Phares.  If you want to increase your knowledge of our current struggle ten-fold in the next two weeks, read Doctor Phares’ books “Future Jihad” and “The War of Ideas”.  As the latter title suggests, the global struggle we’re in right now is ultimately a war of ideas.  Either we get the world’s Islamic population to buy into the notion that co-existing with “the other” (namely us) beats cutting off our heads to use as polo balls, or ultimately the war won’t be one just of ideas.

More than anything else, Iraq is ground zero in the current war of ideas.  If the Iraqis decide to edge away from modernity and instead embrace genocide and Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, it will serve as a clear signal that the war of ideas is lost and that a real war is inevitable.  If, however, democracy and tolerance can take root in Iraq, then quite literally it can happen anywhere. 

Partly for its difficulties, the Iraq war is providing a blueprint for winning the war of ideas.  That of course assumes we win in Iraq and something resembling a modern, peaceful nation arises from the enormous American and Iraqi sacrifices made to date.  If we lose, then those who claim to so piously desire peace will really have something to weep about.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.