Troop levels for the much-hyped Iraqi "Surge" [OC]

Legend:

Blue line: US Troop Totals Green line: US + Coalition Troop Totals Red line: US, Coalition and Iraq Troop Totals Horizontal light brown bars: What 20K troops, the day John McCain asked for them, would have looked like

Things to note.

• "As they stand up, we'll stand down" never happened.
• The troop levels for US and US+Coalition were basically just as high around January, 2005 and January, 2006 as they were at the peak of the "surge."

Data Source:

The Iraq Index from the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

Tool:

I wrote a Perl script to make this, using the Perl module GD::Graph::lines