Politics & Power Quote by Lawrence Korb

The line lands like a progress report that accidentally tells the truth. Korb frames the official success metric - “an increase in the number of Iraqis in training” - only to puncture it with the blunt counterweight: “but more Americans are dying and violence is increasing.” The pivot word “but” is doing the real work here, exposing how wartime messaging often launders outcomes through inputs. Training is an activity you can count; deaths and rising violence are consequences you can’t spin without sounding callous.

The intent is less to offer a tidy policy critique than to sabotage a familiar rhetorical escape hatch: the idea that building local forces automatically signals a corner being turned. By yoking those two clauses together, Korb forces the reader to hold competing realities at once. The subtext is that “progress” has been redefined into something politically survivable - a PowerPoint metric - while the lived, immediate indicators of stability are moving in the wrong direction. It’s a rebuke of technocratic optimism, especially the kind that treats capacity-building as a moral alibi.

Context matters: during the Iraq War, U.S. officials repeatedly leaned on training Iraqi security forces as evidence of momentum and an eventual exit. Korb’s sentence reads as a corrective from someone steeped in policy arguments yet unwilling to indulge the soothing narrative. It’s not anti-training; it’s anti-complacency. The implied question is sharp and uncomfortable: if the numbers you tout are rising, why is the war getting deadlier?