SOMEONE ELSE NOTICES THE FUNNY NUMBERS

Ilan Goldenberg has done some great work analyzing the reports on the dead and injured civilians in Iraq coming from the DoD and PR Petraeus. Now, the MSM seems to be playing catch-up. It seems there is objectively plenty of room to shape the numbers according to one's desires.


What Defines a Killing as Sectarian?
U.S. Military Teams Analyze and Tally Each Civilian Death
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 25, 2007; Page A01

(excerpts)

As with all statistics, however, their meaning depends on how they are gathered and analyzed. "Everybody has their own way of doing it," Macomber said of his sectarian analyses. "If you and I . . . pulled from the same database, and I pulled one day and you pulled the next, we would have totally different numbers."

Apparent contradictions are relatively easy to find in the flood of bar charts and trend lines the military produces. Civilian casualty numbers in the Pentagon's latest quarterly report on Iraq last week, for example, differ significantly from those presented by the top commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, in his recent congressional testimony. Petraeus's chart was limited to numbers of dead, while the Pentagon combined the numbers of dead and wounded -- a figure that should be greater. Yet Petraeus's numbers were higher than the Pentagon's for the months preceding this year's increase of U.S. troops to Iraq, and lower since U.S. operations escalated this summer.

The charts are difficult to compare: Petraeus used monthly figures on a line graph, while the Pentagon computed "Average Daily Casualties" on a bar chart, and neither included actual numbers. But the numerical differences are still stark, and the reasons offered can be hard to parse. The Pentagon, in a written clarification, said that "Gen. Petraeus reported civilian deaths based on incidents reported by Coalition forces plus Iraqi government data. The [Pentagon] report only includes incidents reported by Coalition forces for civilian causality data."

The number of sectarian killings in 2006 -- a key reference point in measuring improvement this year -- has changed considerably in the line graphs used in the Pentagon's past three quarterly reports, increasing between the March and June assessments this year and again in last week's report. Macomber, the analyst in Baghdad, said the first jump occurred when his office realized after the March version was published that a backlog of Iraqi government data had not been included in the 2006 figures.

The most recent increase came when the Pentagon decided to include Iraqis killed in vehicle and suicide bombings, the most obvious forms of sectarian violence. Baghdad had always tallied those numbers along with other killings, Macomber said, but the Pentagon had always taken them out in compiling its own graphs. Asked about the change, a Pentagon spokesman e-mailed that "We regularly review our metrics to determine the most informative way to report what is happening in Iraq."