The Party Bong of Misleading Statistics & Other News on the Mess in Mesopotamia

THE INSURGENCY IN IRAQ IS IN "ITS LAST THROES"

--Vice President Cheney, May 30, 2005

Parsing Iraq war statistics – be they sectarian killings, plain-vanilla killings, U.S. killings, goat and other livestock killings, and so on and so forth – is like getting high on opium. Things feel really good for a while and then you wake up. Or so I'm told.

As White House and Pentagon mouthpieces and war supporters in the mainstream media and blogosphere never learn, it is axiomatic that there is a dark side to every bright-side statistic that is trotted out because at the end of the day the war is going nowhere fast except into next year and beyond.

The latest big toke on the Party Bong of Misleading Statistics comes amidst general hoopla over a welcome decrease in U.S. and Iraqi civilian deaths being attributed to the success of the Surge strategy. This toke is in the form of a news report based on the claims of an anonymous Pentagon official that U.S. and coalition forces have iced 19,429 insurgents since the war began. As in killed, while 6,994 have been wounded and 119,752 arrested. (No word on dead goats.)

As Cernig puts it at NewsHoggers:

"If we take the military's words at face value then 19,000 dead plus three times that many wounded plus 110,000 captured would mean over 180,000 insurgents have been killed, wounded or taken out of combat since the invasion - and the insurgency is still going strong with casualty rates inflicted by insurgents recently still comparable to those of a year ago.

"Either way, it also strongly suggests that the Iraqi intelligence estimate of the total strength of the insurgency - about 200,000 - is far more realistic than the U.S. military's estimate of 20,000 to 30,000. If the latter were the case then the insurgency would have regenerated itself entirely several times over - even accounting for any misidentification - and that would in turn mean that any drop in violence due to the Surge would be a temporary thing at best."

The last throes of the insurgency, my ass.

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As stoopid ideas go, a proposal by Democratic Representative David Obey of Wisconsin to raise taxes to pay for the war is a humdinger.

The cheesehead’s bill hasn't received much support, is poison to the Democratic leadership and is manna from heaven for conservative commentators, but this doesn’t concern Obey, who says he’s merely calling President Bush's bluff on newfound fiscal responsibility.

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Giving new meaning to the word chutzpah, Iraq has ordered $100 million worth of military equipment from China for its police force, contending that the U.S. is unable to provide the materiel and is generally too slow in delivering arms.

The deal has, of course, alarmed military analysts who state that Iraq's security forces already are unable to account for more than 190,000 weapons supplied by the U.S. Many are believed to be in the hands of Shiite and Sunni militias, insurgents and other forces seeking to destabilize Iraq and target U.S. soldiers.

Says Rachel Stohl of the Center for Defense Information, an independent think tank:

"The problem is that the Iraqi government doesn't have as yet a clear plan for making sure that weapons are distributed, that they are properly monitored and repeatedly checked. The end-use monitoring will be left in the hands of a government and military in Iraq that is not yet ready for it. And there's not a way for the U.S. to mandate them to do it if they're not U.S. weapons."

No word on how much lead there might be in the Chinese equipment.

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The Iraqi Army, with Americans along as advisors, have captured two ranking Al Qaeda figures.

One of them served as AQI's banker, pushing more than $50,000 per month into the terrorist network and possibly as much as $100 million during his tenure with the network.

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While Saddam Hussein would never be confused with Mister Rogers, Iraq was relatively stable nation with a smoothly functioning infrastructure, including a public health system that did a pretty good job of keeping people on their feet. That is the ones that didn't get their heads lopped off by the secret service.

But that infrastructure -- from telephone service to electricity to refuse collection -- is in ruins as a result of the brilliantly botched occupation that followed the U.S. invasion, the ineffectual and corruption-ridden efforts to repair it and repeated attacks on it despite the huge successes against that aforementioned insurgency.

This has had a number of unintended consequences. And now this one, as well -- A cholera epidemic that has now spread from northern Iraq and infected over 3,300 people.

Said the World Health Organization (WHO) in a warning to Iraq’s neighbors:

"The disease is continuing to spread across Iraq and dissemination to as yet unaffected areas remains highly possible."

Iraq shares borders with Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.