But overthe past two weeks, the rate and severity of attacks has gone up again. Extrapolating from these post-electopm figures would lead a person to believe that the new status quo is about 75 dead coalition soldiers a month. Compare that to last February, when only 23 coalition soldiers died in Iraq.
And things aren't better for the Iraqis either. In Hilla, south of Baghdad, a crowd of new police recruits were car bombed while waiting outside a clinic for required medical exams, killing 125 people and wounding an additional 130 -- the bloodiest single attack since the fall of Saddam.
It remains to be seen whether the news, no doubt coming out in the next few days, of the 1500th US soldier killed in Iraq will have any real impact. Not a lot, I suspect... but the 2000th US soldier to die in Iraq will probably have a greater effect on the collective psyche. At current rates, expect that to happen sometime around September.
