xrl.us/5ouu -> www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/05/AR2007090502466.html?hpid=topnews
Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends. Reductions in violence form the centerpiece of the Bush administration's claim that its war strategy is working.
Baghdad, overall attacks in Iraq were down to 960 a week in August, compared with 1,700 a week in June, and civilian casualties had fallen 17 percent between December 2006 and last month.
Iraqi soldier waves his national flag from top of an armored vehicle in front of the gates to the Basra Palace complex in Basra, Iraq, Monday, Sept 3, 2007. Iraqi soldiers hoisted the nation's flag over the Basra palace compound Monday after British troops began withdrawing from their last garrison in the city, a move that will hand control to an Iraqi force riddled with Shiite militiamen. Iraqi soldiers hoisted the nation's flag over the Basra palace compound Monday after British troops began withdrawing from their last garrison in the city, a move that will hand control to an Iraqi force riddled with Shiite militiamen.
Shifting Death Counts Quarterly Defense Department reports released in March and June provided significantly different counts of sectarian killings in the second half of 2006. The discrepancy is one example of how shifting statistics paint pictures of progress in Iraq.
Facebook Others who have looked at the full range of US government statistics on violence, however, accuse the military of cherry-picking positive indicators and caution that the numbers -- most of which are classified -- are often confusing and contradictory.
Many of those conclusions were also reflected in last month's pessimistic National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. 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. "Depending on which numbers you pick," he said, "you get a different outcome." going in different directions" compared with previous years, when numbers in different categories varied widely but trended in the same direction.
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."
al-Qaeda -- are also excluded from the US military's calculation of violence levels. The administration has not given up trying to demonstrate that Iraq is moving toward political reconciliation.
Nouri al-Maliki, according to a senior US official involved in Iraq policy. The ministers plan to hand Anbar's governor $70 million in new development funds, the official said. But most of the administration's case will rest on security data, according to military, intelligence and diplomatic officials who would not speak on the record before the Petraeus-Crocker testimony. Several Republican and Democratic lawmakers who were offered military statistics during Baghdad visits in August said they had been convinced that Bush's new strategy, and the 162,000 troops carrying it out, has produced enough results to merit more time. Challenges to how military and intelligence statistics are tallied and used have been a staple of the Iraq war.
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." Recent estimates by the media, outside groups and some government agencies have called the military's findings into question.
The Associated Press last week counted 1,809 civilian deaths in August, making it the highest monthly total this year, with 27,564 civilians killed overall since the AP began collecting data in April 2005.
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