ARTICLE: “Pentagon Widens Program To Foil Bombings In Iraq: Spending Will Be Tripled; C.I.A. and F.B.I. Aid Push to Stem Rising Toll—Technology Hurried,” by Eric Schmitt, New York Times, 6 February 2006, p. A1.

OP-CHART: “31 Days in Iraq,” by Adriana Lins De Albuquerque and Alicia Cheng, New York Times, 6 February 2006, p. A27.

It is heartening to see the Pentagon move harder on IEDs. If we had lost a bunch of aircraft or any ships, frankly, the resulting sound and fury out of the building, not to mention Congress, would have been totally out of proportion. But lose a Marine or soldier day after day after day for months on end? That gets up the “tripled” effort three years into the occupation.

I am less impressed by the NYT’s constant efforts to chart the Iraq insurgency’s impact in Iraq. We are told that over 800 people died in Iraq in that time period. All the icons on this huge chart are displayed for emotional effect, because graphically speaking, it’s almost impossible to get any other impression than that there’s simply a lot of them and they come from all over Iraq (not true, but the icons are artfully arranged to fill the space all around the map, when in reality they come overwhelmingly from the Sunni triangle).

Here’s my preferred chart: a bar chart that shows 4k dead each month in Iraq for years on end across the 1990s as our collective sanctions killed, on average according to the UN, 50k kids and elderly each year; then the totals dropping to below 1k per month since we toppled Saddam, giving, on average, more than 3k Iraqis a chance for a better life each month.

But that would be an unfair chart, focusing as it would on the long term. We don’t want to think long term in this Long War, now do we?