1115.org

Suppose you wanted to take sectarian violence in Iraq, and produce a statistic that said Bush’s Petraeus‘ surge has reduced it by 75%. How would you go about it?

Mind you, when the recent GAO report graded the benchmark “Reduce the level of sectarian violence in Iraq”, they issued a failing grade. Not partially met. Just plain unmet.

And, on Wednesday Comptroller General David Walker, head of the GAO, testified to the House Armed Services Committee that it is “unclear whether sectarian violence has decreased” in Iraq.

But where there’s a will, there’s a way. Especially when it comes to producing made-to-order statistics.

Karen DeYoung’s WaPo article lays bare the secrets of Petraeus’ recipe for cooking up sectarian violence statistics. Here’s how you get to a 75% decline in sectarian violence.

The underlying philosophy:
• First of all, make the underlying numbers classified.
• Then pick whatever fits the agenda. If the number of attacks went up and the number of deaths went down, pick the number of deaths. If the number of attacks went down and the number of deaths went up, pick the number of attacks. (If both went up, pick something else. If nothing went down, bomb Iran.)
• Once you’ve cherry-picked the category, cherry-pick what incidents you count in that category. The golden rule, presumably: don’t count the incidents that went up, count only the incidents that went down.
• Carefully select your baseline. If you’re counting (a carefully selected subset of) the number of attacks, the baseline number for last year should be the month with the highest number of counted attacks.

The fruits of those simple rules (all statements are direct quotes from the WaPo article):
• If a bullet went through the back of the head, it’s sectarian… If it went through the front, it’s criminal.
• Among the most worrisome trends cited by the NIE was escalating warfare between rival Shiite militias in southern Iraq that has consumed the port city of Basra and resulted last month in the assassination of two southern provincial governors. According to a spokesman for the Baghdad headquarters of the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), those attacks are not included in the military’s statistics. “Given a lack of capability to accurately track Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence, except in certain instances,” the spokesman said, “we do not track this data to any significant degree.” (A special round of applause for that “except in certain instances”, please!)
• Attacks by U.S.-allied Sunni tribesmen … are also excluded from the U.S. military’s calculation of violence levels.
• In its December 2006 report, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group identified “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.” (The more things change…)
• When Petraeus told an Australian newspaper last week that sectarian attacks had decreased 75 percent “since last year,” … MNF-I said that “last year” referred to December 2006, when attacks spiked to more than 1,600. (This is widely believed to mean “sectarian attacks” in December were unusually high. Of course, the underlying numbers are all classified. This is the point at which we begin to gasp in open admiration.)
• By March, however — before U.S. troop strength was increased under Bush’s strategy — the number had dropped to 600… . That is about where it has remained in 2007. (This does mean that Petraeus’ magical 75% reduction is not only driven entirely by the choice of baseline month, but the 75% drop came before the surge was actually implemented, before the extra troops were sent in.)

So let’s go ahead and call a spade a spade: General David Petraeus is not just a politician, he’s a bare-faced bloody liar. Only a George Bush would put an man like him a) in charge of the Iraq War, and b) in charge of reporting how that war is going.