Once again the Washington Post buries a critical story in the back pages of its paper:
Experts Doubt Drop In Violence in IraqMilitary Statistics Called Into Question
Reductions in violence form the centerpiece of the Bush administration's claim that its war strategy is working. In congressional testimony Monday, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is expected to cite a 75 percent decrease in sectarian attacks. According to senior U.S. military officials in Baghdad, overall attacks in Iraq were down to 960 a week in August, compared with 1,700 a week in June, and civilian casualties had fallen 17 percent between December 2006 and last month. Unofficial Iraqi figures show a similar decrease.
Others who have looked at the full range of U.S. government statistics on violence, however, accuse the military of cherry-picking positive indicators and caution that the numbers -- most of which are classified -- are often confusing and contradictory. "Let's just say that there are several different sources within the administration on violence, and those sources do not agree," Comptroller General David Walker told Congress on Tuesday in releasing a new Government Accountability Office report on Iraq....
"Depending on which numbers you pick," he said, "you get a different outcome." Analysts found "trend lines . . . going in different directions" compared with previous years, when numbers in different categories varied widely but trended in the same direction. "It began to look like spaghetti."
Among the most worrisome trends cited by the NIE was escalating warfare between rival Shiite militias in southern Iraq that has consumed the port city of Basra and resulted last month in the assassination of two southern provincial governors. According to a spokesman for the Baghdad headquarters of the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), those attacks are not included in the military's statistics. "Given a lack of capability to accurately track Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence, except in certain instances," the spokesman said, "we do not track this data to any significant degree."
Attacks by U.S.-allied Sunni tribesmen -- recruited to battle Iraqis allied with al-Qaeda -- are also excluded from the U.S. military's calculation of violence levels.
Read on in the article and you will see that, as Ilan Goldenberg explains, it is even worse than that.
"The violence numbers do not include: 1) Sunni on Sunni violence. 2) Shi'a on Shi'a violence 3) Car bombs 4) Getting shot in the front of the head."
So long as you leave all of the measures relevant to your average Iraqi citizen out of the analysis, things are getting better. Or rather, they might be getting better, depending on how you evaluate what's left. Maybe.
But never mind that. The surge is "working." Or, in the words of our fearless leader, we're "kicking ass" in Iraq. Which given everything else we know about the way Bush thinks, really should surprise absolutely no one.
That's what I mean by strategic thought. I don't know how you learn that. I don't think there's a moment where that happened to me. I really don't. I know you're searching for it. I know it's difficult. I do know — y'know, how do you decide, how do you learn to decide things? When you make up your mind, and you stick by it — I don't know that there's a moment, Robert. I really — You either know how to do it or you don't. I think part of this is it: I ran for reasons. Principled reasons. There were principles by which I will stand on. And when I leave this office I'll stand on them. And therefore you can't get driven by polls. Polls aren't driven by principles. They're driven by the moment. By the nanosecond.
Kevin Drum has more here if you can stomach it.
UPDATE: I meant to include this section in the excerpt above but forgot. That's unfortunate, because it really tells you everything you need to know:
"If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."
I've heard of lying with statistics, but this is really ridiculous.
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