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.