{"id":12770,"date":"2007-09-04T16:50:35","date_gmt":"2007-09-04T20:50:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/12770.html"},"modified":"2007-09-04T16:50:35","modified_gmt":"2007-09-04T20:50:35","slug":"lies-damn-lies-and","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/lies-damn-lies-and\/","title":{"rendered":"Lies, damn lies, and&#8230;."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With the release of the GAO report on Iraq already out, and positioning in advance of next week well underway, you&#8217;re likely to hear quite a few numbers being tossed around. When it comes to the surge, keep in mind that even the encouraging news is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.democracyarsenal.org\/2007\/09\/car-bombings-do.html\">not quite what it seems<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>According to U.S. military figures, an average of 1,000 Iraqis have died each month since March in sectarian violence. That compares with about 1,200 a month at the start of the security plan, the military said in an e-mailed response to queries. This does not include deaths from car bombings, which the military said have numbered more than 2,600 this year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Read that again. The casualty rates have gone down about 20% &#8212; but that <i>doesn&#8217;t<\/i> include car bombs, which go off with some frequency.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s more, Matt Yglesias <a href=\"http:\/\/matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com\/archives\/2007\/09\/when_is_a_casualty_not_a_casua.php\">notes<\/a>, &#8220;It seems that when a Shiite kills a Shiite (as happens frequently in the south) that doesn&#8217;t count. Similarly, when a Sunni kills a Sunni, that doesn&#8217;t count. Nor does it count <i>when the death was caused by a car bomb<\/i> since, obviously, well, um, I couldn&#8217;t even say. The exclusion of Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence seems like a clever-if-underhanded exploitation of critics&#8217; tendency to deploy the phrase &#8220;sectarian violence&#8221; even though there&#8217;s a lot of <i>politically motivated<\/i> violence that isn&#8217;t sectarian in nature. The car bomb exclusion seems entirely unprincipled.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It seems like a rather straightforward issue &#8212; why not include one of the most common forms of attacks when compiling civilian casualties? Isn&#8217;t this a bit like a U.S. city compiling a homicide rate, but deciding that shootings don&#8217;t count?<\/p>\n<p>Maybe some enterprising press corps member can ask the White House for an explanation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With the release of the GAO report on Iraq already out, and positioning in advance of next week well underway, you&#8217;re likely to hear quite a few numbers being tossed around. When it comes to the surge, keep in mind that even the encouraging news is not quite what it seems. According to U.S. military [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12770\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}