How Accurate are Statistics re: Iraq War?

Posted by The Crux | As General David Petraeus prepares to deliver his Iraq progress-report to Congress, the statistics underlying Petraeus' conclusions have come under fire by multiple analysts.

Petraeus is expected to say that sectarian violence in Iraq has decreased by 75% (Washington Post-1).  If accurate, that figure may show that President Bush's troop-surge strategy is working.

Frankly, I don't grasp why the Bush Administration went to the trouble of setting a date and building worldwide anticipation of Petraeus' report, if staffers were going to anonymously leak details to the press?.

Among those that challenged Petraeus' statistics on Iraq violence were the Government Accountability Office (GAO), likely the most non-partisan government entity because it answers to both Republicans and Democrats. A recent GAO report states that violence in Iraq is still high and that Iraq has failed to meet all but two of the nine security goals that are part of Congress' 18 benchmarks (GAO Report # 07-1222T and Washington Post-2).

The recent National Intelligence Estimate  is more in line with the GAO's conclusions than with Petraeus' (partially leaked) report....

Some war-supporting members of the House Armed Services Committee attacked the GAO and chose to believe military analysts' conclusions (The Hill).  Comptroller General David Walker, who oversees the GAO, pointed out that military analysts are not independent of politics because they fall under the Bush Administration's umbrella -- while the GAO is independent.

Members of the intelligence community similarly question the accuracy of military-generated conclusions, partly because of data cherry-picking. WaPo reported:

"The intelligence community has its own problems with military calculations. 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.'

"'Depending on which numbers you pick,' he said, 'you get a different outcome.' Analysts found 'trend lines . . . going in different directions' compared with previous years, when numbers in different categories varied widely but trended in the same direction. 'It began to look like spaghetti.'"

The upshot is that no one knows for sure whether violence in Iraq has drastically decreased or whether the troop-surge is working.