Iraq: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

A journalist I know, who has spent a lot of time in Iraq, tells the story of talking to an American infantry major in Baghdad the day Saddam's statue was toppled in Firdos Square, almost four and a half years ago.

He asked, "What now?" The officer replied, "I expect our job is over." He thought thousands of military police immediately would be airlifted in to patrol the streets of Baghdad. "We can't do that with our tanks and Bradley's and howitzers," the major reasoned. "We're not equipped to do that." Surely, he believed, the United States government, which he so proudly served, had a plan.

But Washington didn't. And so, there was rampant, unchecked looting, and then the sectarian violence, insurgency, bloodshed and terrorism that traumatize Iraq to this very day.

Throughout, the Bush administration has misinterpreted, cooked or hidden the numbers that tell the real story: the number of attacks, the number of suicide bombings, the numbers of civilian dead and wounded. For politicians and generals, statistics (as I have quoted an old British truism here before) are like a lamppost to a drunk - used more for support than illumination.

This brings us to Army General David Petraeus, commander of our forces in Iraq, and United States Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker. Both are distinguished men with estimable records of service to their country, but their joint appearances in DC this week may turn out to be the most fraudulent road tour since Milli Vanilli traveled the world lip-synching to other people singing "Girl You Know It's True."

Their Congressional testimony feels like the latest round in a game that, over the course of events, has gone roughly like this: Step over this line. Okay, now step over THIS line. Fine. So, step over THIS line ... and on and on. In January, when the president announced the surge, he told us that by September we'd know if it was successful. Now we're asked by Petraeus and others to wait another six months - that next March will be the new September - and even further, if you believe Robert Draper's new book, "Dead Certain," in which President Bush is quoted as saying, "I'm playing for October-November." Read: Election 2008. Let it be someone else's problem.

We are a nation of Charlie Browns, with the Bush administration holding the football. And the football is the unfortunate people of Iraq and the stalwart American women and men sweating, fighting and dying there.

General Petraeus himself hauled out the gridiron analogy last week in a letter to the troops. We are, he wrote, "a long way from the goal line, but we do have the ball and we are driving down the field." As Charlie Brown would say, good grief.

The general and Ambassador Crocker tell us the surge is working, but, faas political columnist Joe Conason notes, it was supposed to "revive chances for political reconciliation among that country's warring ethnic and religious factions. Were the surge to be judged by that original metric - a reduction in violence sufficient to encourage real cooperation among the warring sides - then it has certainly failed so far."

In his testimony before the House on Monday, General Petraeus announced, "Civilian deaths of all categories, less natural causes, have ... declined considerably, by over 45 percent Iraq-wide since the height of the sectarian violence in December." He claimed that in Baghdad they have declined 70 percent.

These and other numbers are suspect. Last Thursday, the Washington Post's Karen De Young reported, "Many experts within and outside the government ... contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends."

Among other findings, De Young discovered, "Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] 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.'" What's more, a military spokesman told the Post, "Given a lack of capability to accurately track Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence, except in certain instances, we do not track this data to any significant degree."

General Petraeus wouldn't be the first military man to be caught in a web of dubious statistics and data. Witness Generals William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams during the Vietnam "body count" years or Colin Powell during the lead-up to our current predicament.

In fact, now that he's liberated from the constraints of government work, what Powell just told GQ Magazine about Iraq's continuing decline into chaos is especially choice. "You can surge all of the American troops you want, but they can't stop this," he said. "Suppose I'm a battalion commander. My troops ask, 'What do I do today, boss?' 'Let's go fight the Shia militias!' 'What do I do tomorrow?' 'Let's go fight the Sunni insurgents!' 'What do I do the day after tomorrow?' 'Let's go chase Al Qaeda!' 'What do we do the day after that?' 'We're going to guard streets!' Our kids are fantastic. But this is not sustainable. Our surge can work only with an Iraqi political and military surge."

There are slightly fewer than 500 days left in the Bush presidency. No matter what, the American surge will end. It has to - our military can't sustain these troop levels and still have any semblance of global preparedness. And so, a few thousand troops will come home this year, and if all goes well, and according to General Petraeus's projections, we'll be back to presurge levels by next summer.

In other words, by the time of next year's party political conventions, we still will have 130,000 troops in Iraq.

In other words, on Inauguration Day 2009, those troops - and Iraqis, of course - will still be dying.

Are we nuts?

Michael Winship, Writers Guild of America Award winner and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes this weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York. This article was previously published in the Messenger Post.

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