‘It began to look like spaghetti’

Hoping desperately to maintain the status quo, the Bush administration insists that Iraq is less violent now than it was before the “surge” policy went into effect. Forget political progress, reconciliation, and the agreed-upon benchmarks, they say; reduced violence proves how effective the strategy is.

The WaPo’s Karen DeYoung wrote a must-read on the subject today, doing exactly the kind of heavy lifting that the media needs to do more of. What DeYoung found wasn’t surprising, but it was depressing: the administration is playing games with the numbers and cherry-picking statistics in a deceptive way.

Specifically, Gen. Petraeus is expected to say there’s been a 75% drop in sectarian attacks, a 56% drop in overall attacks, and a 17% drop in civilian casualties. All of this, it turns out, is suspect, and in some instances, contradictory.

The intelligence community has its own problems with military calculations. Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. “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.” (emphasis added)

“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.”

They’re making up standards as they go along, in the hopes they can keep the charade up just long enough to fool policy makers. It’s almost comical what doesn’t count towards the military’s data.

When rival Shiite militias battle in Basra, their death tolls don’t count, since both sides are Shia. When Sunni tribes, cooperating with the U.S. against the wishes of the Maliki government, attack Sunni AQI, that doesn’t count. Car bombs don’t count. If an American kills an Iraqi civilian, that also isn’t included in the tallies.

This isn’t exactly new. The Iraq Study Group noted in December 2006 that there had been “significant underreporting of violence,” noting that “a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the sources of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the data base.” The report concluded that “good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.”

But as the administration’s need for some kind of public relations boost became more desperate, so, too, did the administration’s willingness to play fast and loose with the numbers.

Petraeus, in particular, is peddling bogus data.

Attacks labeled “sectarian” are among the few statistics the military has consistently published in recent years, although the totals are regularly recalculated. The number of monthly “sectarian murders and incidents” in the last six months of 2006, listed in the Pentagon’s quarterly Iraq report published in June, was substantially higher each month than in the Pentagon’s March report. MNF-I said that “reports from un-reported/not-yet-reported past incidences as well as clarification/corrections on reports already received” are “likely to contribute to changes.”

When Petraeus told an Australian newspaper last week that sectarian attacks had decreased 75 percent “since last year,” the statistic was quickly e-mailed to U.S. journalists in a White House fact sheet. Asked for detail, MNF-I said that “last year” referred to December 2006, when attacks spiked to more than 1,600.

By March, however — before U.S. troop strength was increased under Bush’s strategy — the number had dropped to 600, only slightly less than in the same month last year. That is about where it has remained in 2007, with what MNF-I said was a slight increase in April and May “but trending back down in June-July.”

Petraeus’s spokesman, Col. Steven A. Boylan, said he was certain that Petraeus had made a comparison with December in the interview with the Australian paper, which did not publish a direct Petraeus quote. No qualifier appeared in the White House fact sheet.

Why, oh why, did the Washington Post run this story on page A16? It’s the kind of report that should fundamentally alter next week’s hearings and congressional debate.

“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 might even buy this in some strange way IF Iraq, prior to the US invasion, was a hotbed of criminal activity where street-crime murder was high. But something tells me street-crime murder wasn’t really a problem back then…

  • “… keep the charade up just long enough to fool policy makers….”

    Which doesn’t take a whole hell of a lot, does it?

    By the way, has anyone heard anything at all out of Nancy Pelosi since Congress went on its recess? So far as I can tell she hasn’t made a single appearance back in her home district of San Francisco. She’s been on no TeeVee shows that I know of. Are any Democrats, other than presidential candidates, alive at all? Is everyone now in Bush’s bubble?

  • Why, oh why, did the Washington Post run this story on page A16?

    Because it only helps the DFHs. The Serious people all know we have to stay in Iraq because leaving would make things worse. Cough. And it’s good to see this line again: “good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.”

    Translation: BushCo is still lying.

    Of course the sad part is that the Dimocrats are still acting as though leaving BushCo in place doesn’t constitute criminal negligence.

    Shut it down, congress. What the hell are you waiting for? Oh yeah. I forget…

    The Lobby says we’re just getting started:

    Israeli Defense Force chief artillery officer Gen. Oded Tira has griped that “President Bush lacks the political power to attack Iran,” adding that since “an American strike in Iran is essential for [Israel’s] existence, we must help him pave the way by lobbying the Democratic Party (which is conducting itself foolishly) and US newspaper editors. We need to do this in order to turn the Iran issue to a bipartisan one and unrelated to the Iraq failure.” Tira urges the Lobby to turn to “potential presidential candidates. . . so that they support immediate action by Bush against Iran,”

    […]

    “The neocons know full well that if a war with Iran were to be started either inadvertently or by design, few within America’s political system would be brave enough to stand up in opposition.

    http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp02242007.html

  • I wish BushCo would just man up and say they’re going to stay in Iraq no matter how bad it gets but that would require a real pair of balls. Instead we get chickenshit attempts to trick people into thinking everything is hunky-dory so we’ll agree to stay, therefore it won’t be BushCo’s fault when October rolls around and the death tolls jump again.

  • CB: Why, oh why, did the Washington Post run this story on page A16? It’s the kind of report that should fundamentally alter next week’s hearings and congressional debate.

    Because America is a war culture. The establishment do not want an end to the war. War is too good for business. That’s why the Washington Post runs such a crucial story on page A16.

  • 2. On September 6th, 2007 at 1:10 pm, Ed Stephan said:
    By the way, has anyone heard anything at all out of Nancy Pelosi since Congress went on its recess?

    I’m guessing that she was chained-up down in Darth Cheney’s dungeon.

  • Spaghetti? With tomato sauce? A bloody mess in more ways than one… But Dems are getting ready to “compromise” again, of course; all’s well and all’s well and all is swell.

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