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Truth that lurks behind tactical statistics
By Damien McElroy in Baghdad
Last Updated: 1:54am BST 10/09/2007

Winston Churchill's maxim that truth in wartime is attended by a
bodyguard of lies haunts the testimony that America's senior commander
in Iraq will deliver to Congress today.

Armed with a doctorate from Princeton, Gen Petraeus is a soldier who
finds a laptop as useful as a gun. But there are persistent
allegations that he is cherry-picking favourable statistics to show
that the "surge" in troops has begun to stabilise Iraq.

Gen Petraeus has indicated the tone of his report in a letter to
troops serving in Iraq. "The overall trajectory has been encouraging,"
he wrote on Friday. "The progress has not, to be sure, been uniform
across Baghdad or across Iraq."

The headline figures show that the number of civilian deaths in Iraq
fell to 1,674 in August, roughly half the 2,966 recorded in the same
period last year.

Gen Petraeus points to June as the turning point of US fortunes in
Iraq. By then all 30,000 additional troops were deployed in country.
Monthly US troop deaths dropped over the course of the summer to 83 in
August from a high of 126 in May.

The military claims that the recorded number of sectarian attacks in
Baghdad in August was 321 incidents, compared to 1,621 last December.
The average number of car bombs in the capital has also roughly halved
to an average of 23 in the three summer months, compared with 42 in
the same period last year.

Paul Krugman, an anti-White House columnist, has been quick to charge
that the figures the American military use are tightly defined to
screen out thousands of victims of the violence unleashed since Saddam
Hussein's overthrow.

A casualty shot in the back of the head is defined as a victim of
sectarian violence but someone shot in the temple is slain by
criminals, he wrote. Officials have disputed the charge but admit that
their data is based on a narrowly defined set of criteria.

Other critics point out that because sectarian cleansing has largely
been completed across swathes of Baghdad, the number of Sunni-Shia
killings was bound to fall.

Gen Petraeus's message will be that progress is too fragile to permit
a reduction of troops. Of 18 benchmarks of political progress in Iraq,
only seven have been met.

"No military effort can be sustained without major progress on the
political front, which the surge was supposed to bring about in the
first place, but hasn't," said Joost Hiltermann, the Middle East
director of the International Crisis Group.

No matter what Gen Petraeus tells the Congress, one statistic is
certain. The overstretch of the US military will ensure the end of the
surge from April next year.

American commanders must hope that Iraq's army will be ready to meet
the challenge.
 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/10/wiraq310.xml



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