The president’s speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars’ national convention was a real piece of work, with the deception-per-sentence ratio running pretty close to 1:1, but as Spencer Ackerman noted, this was one of the more startling deceptions:
“In Iraq, our troops are taking the fight to the extremists and radicals and murderers all throughout the country. Our troops have killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists every month since January of this year.” (Applause.)
Well, that sounds like quite a few eliminated terrorists. Let’s see, 1,500 captured or killed al Qaeda terrorists a month, over the course of eight months, that’s 12,000.
It all sounds rather encouraging, just so long as you don’t look too closely at reality.
The precise size of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is not known. Estimates are that it may have from a few thousand to 5,000 fighters and perhaps twice as many supporters. While the membership of the group is mostly Iraqi, the role that foreigners play is crucial.
Hmm, as many as 5,000 fighters (perhaps less), plus maybe 10,000 “supporters.” At this point, if Bush was telling the truth this morning, we’ve practically eliminated the al Qaeda presence in Iraq. And in only eight months!
At this rate, we’ll have eliminated al Qaeda fighters and supporters from Iraq entirely before Thanksgiving. I guess, then, we can start preparations for withdrawal?
Well, perhaps not. Ackerman takes a closer look at Bush’s cynical claim.
Since the surge began, the U.S. has had between 17,000 and 23,000 Iraqis in custody each month, according to the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index (pdf). Last month, Ned Parker of the Los Angeles Times reported that of the 19,000 detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq, only 135 were foreigners — the most likely indicator of membership in al-Qaeda. Military and intelligence veterans of the Iraq war typically say that determining Iraqi membership in AQI is extraordinarily difficult, and not something that lends itself particularly well to flat, quantitative statements.
No wonder the president picked the artful qualifier “and other extremists” to lard his presentation of who the U.S. is capturing in Iraq. It’s impossible to disprove the statement, since it conceals precisely how many of the 1,500 monthly captures are in fact AQI. But an inability to disprove a statement doesn’t ever make that statement true — rather, that makes it gibberish.
Alas, Bush has been making up numbers like this for quite a while. There was, for example, the time the president claimed U.S. forces had captured or killed two-thirds of al Qaeda’s senior leadership.
White House and U.S. intelligence officials declined to provide any back-up data for how they developed the new number — or even to explain the methodology that was used, which they said was classified. The absence of any explanation, as well as the timing, prompted some counterterrorism experts to deride the figure as “meaningless” and predict the revision could fuel allegations that the administration is massaging terrorism data for political purposes.
“It’s like a shell game,” said Vince Cannistraro, a former top CIA counterterrorism official. “This kind of thing is susceptible to all kinds of manipulation.”
An official with the recently disbanded 9/11 commission also dismissed the new number, noting that it was impossible to get a firm handle on precisely the number of Al Qaeda “leaders” that were in place at the time of the September 11 attacks — the definition that the CIA says it used as its baseline for the estimate.
“It was meaningless when they said two thirds and it’s meaningless when they said three fourths,” said the official, who asked not to be identified. “This sounds like it was pulled out of somebody’s orifice.”
Regrettably, it’s a common problem with this White House. We’re dealing with people who just don’t care about telling the truth.