Freedom is on the March, part II

Election Day in Iraq is a little more than two months away. In the meantime, there are still "insurgent strongholds" which the U.S. military is hoping to "clear" by election day; 11 strongholds according to MSNBC.com.

(And this is the point where it stops being about WMDs and starts being about free and safe elections.)

After one week of fighting insurgents in Fallujah,
37 U.S. service members have been killed in action,
320 wounded in action, and
120 insurgents have been killed
(the first two numbers are from the DoD briefing yesterday, and the last number is an estimate from MSNBC.com).

Assuming that the next ten hotspots get cleared before election day (fighting in Mosul has already begun), let's estimate that over the holidays,
407 more U.S. service members will be killed
3,520 more will be injured, and
1,320 more insurgents will be killed.

These are pretty conservative numbers considering Fallujah isn't completely clear and the month ain't over yet (and with 91 fatalities, November is already the 2nd deadliest month in Iraq since the start of the war).

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According to the Pentagon,
1,210 U.S. service members have been killed in Iraq, and
8,956 have been wounded
since fighting began 20 months ago.

According to the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore,
over 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died
either directly or indirectly due to coalition operations.