Bob Woodward Hawking New Book

Bob Woodward is still looking for the next Watergate. It has been over thirty years since he and Carl Bernstein uncovered the Watergate burglary cover-up that led to Richard Nixon's resignation. He would love for his next trophy to be George W. Bush.

CBS News reports that Woodward's new book charges that the Bush Administration is keeping secret the fact that coalition troops in Iraq are attacked every 15 minutes on average. (If Bush is keeping it secret, how does Woodward know it?) He said: "It's getting to the point now where there are eight-, nine-hundred attacks a week. That's more than 100 a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces."

Apparently arithmetic is not Woodward's strong suit. Four attacks per hour is 96 attacks per day. That's fewer than 100 per day, not more than 100. And 96 per day is 672 per week, not 800 or 900. But that's nitpicking.

Is Bush trying to keep all this secret? Not according to an MSNBC report:

"U.S. military officials have stated publicly that the level of violence in Iraq is on the rise, and confirm the number of attacks in Iraq is about 120 per day -- nearly 900 per week -- but that also includes attacks against Iraqi security forces and civilians, not only U.S. forces.

In fact, the Pentagon's quarterly report on violence in Iraq publicly released last month shows nearly 800 attacks per week from May to August 2006 against all targets."

Is 800 attacks per week a surprising or alarming number? Not if compared to shootings in Philadelphia. Fox News reports that 317 people were shot in Philadelphia during the first two-and-a-half months of this year. That's not 800 per week but it's just one city and no war is going on -- at least not a declared war.

According to Fox, a trauma surgeon in Philadelphia says: "The military sends its surgeons to inner cities to learn about trauma surgery because we have so much experience dealing with multiple gunshot wounds every day. We can prepare Army surgeons for what they will face on the battlefield."

Woodward also decries the fact that Bush is getting advice from Henry Kissinger, who believes that the problem in Vietnam was we lost our will. Well, that was exactly the problem in Vietnam. And Woodward and his ilk would love to make it the same problem in Iraq.

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