Troops Numbers in Iraq: Two Steps Higher, One Step Back

Foul Rumsfeld's just announced a possible 5% US troop reduction in Iraq.  Being a numbers guy, this got me thinking: is this really a reduction, or just another game with numbers in order to placate The People?

A quick Google found this article from January 12, 2005.  Two interesting points can be seen:

1. At that time we had just increased the number of troops to 150,000 ahead of of the January 30 elections.  For last week's elections, we beefed up to 160,000 troops.  If the local Iraqi forces are actually getting more capable, then why would we need an extra 10,000 of our people this time?  Seems to me that either the situation is getting worse, or the Iraqi forces are getting less capable - in any case, the actual numbers are not a hopeful trend.

2.  In the article, Colin Powell states "With the assumption of that greater burden [by the Iraqi forces], the burden on our troops should go down, and we should start to see our numbers [of troops in Iraq] going in the other direction".  As far as I can tell, the "base" number of troops in Iraq remained the same for all of 2005, at 138,000 troops.

So, while the Bush Administration is telling us one thing, the numbers tend to indicate another thing.

UPDATE: Thanks to Newsjock from DU for pointing me to this graph from an article in today's SF Chronicle: 

According to the chart, troop count was at the same level for the January election as for last week's election, contradicting the earlier story.  In any case, it looks like levels didn't go down to pre-election levels after the January election.