HOW TO LIE WITH STATISTICS

Shockingly, Saint Petraeus sat before Congress on Monday and talked about how much the situation in Baghdad is improving. I don't know about you, but I didn't see that coming. I thought for sure he was going to tell Congress "God, it's totally fucked up over there, and it gets worse every day." His glowing assessment of the situation is as candid as it is surprising.

He repeated a claim he made last week to the Australian media, namely that "sectarian violence" has fallen by something like 75% since last year.

Considering that every other source on the planet reports no change – or perhaps even a slight increase – in civilian deaths, how on Earth did the military come up with a bunch of graphs and statistics showing the exact opposite? It's pretty easy, really. I think this Washington Post piece sums it up nicely. I draw your attention to the following quotes:

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."

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(…)those attacks are not included in the military's statistics.
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"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."

Attacks by U.S.-allied Sunni tribesmen — recruited to battle Iraqis allied with al-Qaeda — are also excluded from the U.S. military's calculation of violence levels.

Given that we already know that U.S. military statistics do not count car bombs or Improvised Explosive Devices in their civilian death counts, what Saint Petraeus really said today is simple:

"Well, Congressmen, civilian casualties are plummeting, as long as you don't consider Shiites who kill other Shiites, Sunnis who kill other Sunnis, civilians killed by U.S.-armed violent militias, people killed by car bombs, or people shot in the front of the head as civilian casualties."

And clearly, what reasonable person would consider any of those things to be indicators of violence? I mean, hey, our leaders in Washington are realists!
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When they say Baghdad needs security, they don't mean there won't be a few truck bombs or death squads here and there. Nothing's perfect, right?