Just 29 U.S. military personnel have died in Iraq in October so far--down from 65 in September, 84 in August, 78 in July, 101 in June ... You get the picture: Fewer, in most cases far fewer, than half as many American soldiers have died this month than in any previous month all year.

However, some perspective is warranted. First, all told, 2007 has been a horrible year for American lives lost in this war--832 to date, more than the 822 lost in all of 2006, and, by the time the year ends, almost certainly more than the 846 killed in 2005 or the 849 in 2004.

True, this month marks the second month in a row in which fatalities have declined, and that's noteworthy. But it doesn't quite constitute a trend, much less an occasion for celebrating.

Second, the slight increase in American fatalities this year, up until recently, is no surprise. When Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, announced a shift to a counterinsurgency strategy--in which his troops would move more aggressively against militias and live among the Iraqi people instead of hunkering down in their massive bases--he acknowledged that the strategy carried risks and that more American casualties would be one of the consequences.

So, what accounts for the decline in American deaths since the summer? It's hard to say for sure, but one little-reported cause is almost certainly a relative shift in U.S. tactics from fighting on the ground to bombing from the air.

...(although this) shift means greater safety for our ground troops, it also generates more local hostility. Striking urban targets from the air inevitably means killing more innocent bystanders. This makes some of the bystanders' relatives yearn for vengeance. And it makes many Iraqis--relatives, neighbors, and others watching the news of the attack on television--less trusting of the American troops who are supposedly protecting them.

In a conventional war, these consequences might be deemed unavoidable side-effects. But in a counterinsurgency campaign, where the point is to sway the hearts and minds of the population, wreaking such damage is self-defeating.

From January to September of this year, according to unclassified data, U.S. Air Force pilots in Iraq have flown 996 sorties that involved dropping munitions. By comparison, in all of 2006, they flew just 229 such sorties--one-quarter as many. In 2005, they flew 404; in 2004, they flew 285.

In other words, in the first nine months of 2007, Air Force planes dropped munitions on targets in Iraq more often than in the previous three years combined.

More telling still, the number of airstrikes soared most dramatically at about the same time that U.S. troop fatalities declined....'

So it is not the case that 'as we stand down, they stand up'. Instead what is happening is that as 'we' (i.e. the soldiers) stand down, the air force stands up, and, increasingly, the war becomes an air war, with the handy consequence (for politicians) of far fewer American and British soldiers coming home in body bags....but far more Iraqi civilians coming home in the same state.

You would not, of course, know any of this from the media. Indeed, the mere notion of an 'air war' has been something of a taboo in the Western Media.

As Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt pointed out a while ago

'In recent years in Iraq, the only "bombers" we hear about are of the suicide car or truck variety. This is strange indeed, because nothing should have stopped American journalists from visiting our air bases in the region, from spending time with pilots, or from simply looking up at the evidently crowded skies over their hotels.

The only good mainstream report on American air power in Iraq in this period has been Seymour Hersh's New Yorker piece, "Up in the Air," in December 2005 - significantly enough, by a journalist who had never set foot in Iraq. He reminded U.S. then of something forgotten for several decades - that President Richard Nixon's "Vietnamization" plan to withdraw all American "ground troops" (but not tens of thousands of U.S. advisors) from South Vietnam also involved a massive ratcheting upward of the American air war. Hersh reported that, in late 2005, George W. Bush's Iraqification formula ("Our strategy is straightforward: As Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down...") was but a Vietnamization plan in sheep's clothing. As he wrote at the time: "A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President's public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units."

In recent months, as the revived Taliban has surged in Afghanistan and U.S. as well as NATO troops have proven in short supply, this is just what has happened. Air power has increasingly been called upon; civilian casualties have been spiking; and Afghans have been growing ever more upset and oppositional. Iraq will undoubtedly be next. There is, as Nick Turse indicates below, already evidence that the use of air power is "surging" in that country.

Here, then, is a post-surge formula to keep in mind: "Withdrawal" equals an increase in air power (as long as the commitment to withdraw isn't a total one). This is no less true of the "withdrawal" plans of the major Democratic presidential candidates and the Democratic congressional mainstream as it is of any administration planning for future draw-downs. All of these plans are largely confined to withdrawing or redeploying American "combat brigades," which add up to only something like half of all American forces in Iraq. None of this will necessarily lessen the American war there. As Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Hersh, it may only "change the mix of the forces doing the fighting." A partial withdrawal is actually likely, at least for a time, to increase the destructive brutality of the war on the American side.'

That was written in May, but Kaplan's article would seem to suggest that its predictions are coming true. If, as even George Bush now admits, Iraq is Vietnam redux, we now seem to be in the early 'seventies, when the alleged 'withdrawal' of American troops was matched by a huge increase in bombing raids. This was also the time when the war spilled out beyond the Vietnamese borders, to Cambodia and Laos.