🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sep 10, 2:46 am, Alan Smithee <AlanSmit...@nospam.nul> wrote:
> 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
> dir


Bush is losing the terrorism fight with the help of a very stupid,
ignorant and overzealous Republican party that back his ignorance in
staying in Iraq. It takes brains to win the fight against terrorism,
so I think it is quite obvious why we are losing this fight, with a
Republican White House and six years of a Republican Congress and
Senate, what else do you need to know?  All our money is gone, gone to
the waste of human lives, time and resources in creating the terrorist
state that is now Iraq. Americans have paid dearly with our money, the
lives of our troops and time, none of which we will ever get back, and
all for what? to create an entire country now infiltrated and over run
with thousands upon thousands more terrorists than were there before,
Iraq the terrorist state. Republicans are not patriots, they are
reckless idiots playing war games with our money and other people's
lives. They have not protected America, they have not furthered
America, they have destroyed America.