January was yet another record-setting month in terms of the number of Iraqi civilians killed in Chimpy’s Vanity War, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry.

Blasts killed 24 people in Iraq and mortar bombs rained down on a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad on Thursday as new figures showed that civilians deaths edged up to another record in January.

The data from an Interior Ministry official, widely viewed as an indicative but only partial record of violent deaths, showed 1,971 people died from “terrorism” in Iraq in January, slightly up from the previous high of 1,930 deaths in December.

Let’s not forget that the Interior Ministry’s count of civilian deaths has been notoriously conservative. For instance, in December 2006 the Interior Ministry counted 1,930 civilian deaths while the UN reported 2,914.