The Party Bong of Misleading Statistics & Other News on Mess-opotamia

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.

Please click here to read the rest of this Iraq war digest at Kiko’s House.