From Tigerhawk:
There have been only five American KIA in Iraq since June 26 (excluding one poor soldier who died on July 2 from injuries incurred in 2005). No American soldier has died in combat since July 15, the longest such period since the invasion. Recorded deaths of Iraqi civilians were at their lowest level since April 2005, notwithstanding a spate of female suicide bombings in the last week of the month. Still too high, but let's put it in perspective. If you annualize the 305 civilians who died in July and divide it into Iraq's population of 27.5 million, you get 0.00013. In July, at least, an Iraqi's risk of death from homicide was only 16% higher than in the United States during the first year of the Clinton administration. Now, you can take such thinking too far; the Iraqi statistics probably understate homicide because they are based on press accounts, and there is a big psychological difference between garden-variety homicide and deaths from bombing. But that does not make the improvement any less impressive.
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