Today's Washington Post has a detailed and disturbing article about the process the Bush administration is going through to distort data coming out of Iraq in order to present a rosier picture for the American public and US Congress entering this month's debate on war funding.
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."
Now, there's no doubt that there are different sorts of violence in Iraq. But funneling reporting of combat or sectarian deaths into a criminal data merely by making the blanket assumption that getting shot in the front of the head is a criminal attack (or to put it another way, the only time people get shot in the front of the head is by criminals), speaks to a deliberate policy of providing a false account of what sort of violence is taking place in Iraq.
"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."
This goes hand in hand with previously documented data editing policies that include not counting car bombs as attacks either. Violence has consistently been defined down to present the best situation possible, regardless of what the actual conditions in Iraq are.
The White House, General Petraeus, and Ambassador Crocker will report on the levels of violence in Iraq, but not count people getting shot in the head, car bombs, Sunni on Sunni attacks, and Shia on Shia attacks as violence. It's dishonest and it will serve to prolong the war, cost more Americans their lives, and cost more Iraqis theirs as well.
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. [Emphasis added]
We already know that the data is inaccurate and incomplete. We also know that the Bush administration is selectively citing the data to present the most positive picture possible of the level of violence in Iraq. This bears striking similarity to the Bush administration's well-documented politicization of the Government Accountability Office report on political progress in Iraq -- the Bush administration edited the final version to show a greater increase of political progress by the Iraqi government over the assessment provided by the non-partisan GAO. The Bush administration has made a concerted, multi-pronged effort to create an image of Iraq for the American public - and the US Congress - to see that has no relationship to the actual facts on the ground.
The stated reason for escalating the war and sending over 30,000 more American troops into Iraq was to stabilize the violence to allow for political progress. There has not been political progress in Iraq. Violence, particularly violence against American troops, has risen over the course of the surge. We are about to finish our bloodiest summer in Iraq.
And yet the Bush administration wants us to think that conditions in Iraq are improving, so we must keep our troops longer to allow the situation to further improve until...some other point in time comes when we'll be told that progress continues to necessitate keeping our troops in Iraq in perpetuity.
Never mind that more American troops are dying than last year or the year before or the year before and despite their sacrifices, political progress is not being made.
Never mind that if the Bush administration were honest and admitted that we're not making progress towards securing Iraq, they would still use the decline in the situation on the ground as justification for continuing to keep our troops there at the current levels. The Bush administration logic on peddling our continued presence in Iraq to the American public remains "Heads I win, Tails you lose."
This is not an honest account of the state of the war to the American people. It will only prolong George Bush's war at the expense of our military and our treasury.
