One of Those Times I Hate To Be Right

The Prediction

Did I call it? Or did I muthafuckin' call it?

Back in July 17, shortly after the release of the interim progress report on the Surge I said this:

Come on!! Who actually believes that any report coming from the Bush Administration this September will say anything but what they feel is necessary to say in order to maintain (and in this case further escalate) our presence in Iraq.

Like the flawed and dishonest Iraq Progress report released this past week, the report in September will fudge figures, distort reality, and lower the bar of what is 'progress' in order to claim that there is some progress due to their surge (where there is actually none).


They will then claim that these optimistic signs of progress prove that the surge is making progress in Iraq, and that they will say is why they will need an 'even bigger surge' to make even bigger gains.

*sigh* It appears we live with a government whose governing philosophy is based around the idea of "when your stuck in a ditch, keep digging"

In other subsequent posts I've mentioned that this "progress" they will claim will be used by those "wavering Republicans" to continue supporting the war. Idiots in the press and in the Democratic Party wrongfully believed that once the report came in September, it would show little progress and force Republicans to vote against the war....WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!

The mistake they made was assuming that they would not fudge the September report in the same way that they fudged the July report.

I wrote this one August 15, 2007 . Pay careful attention to my prediction

Due around mid-September is a final progress report on the current 'surge ' strategy in Iraq. Now, it was billed as a report not only written by the military itself, but as the report of the last person who still seems to hold credibility with Congress - General Petraeus. Me, being me, was always suspicious about the report because as so full of integrity as Gen. Petraeus is reported to be he is just a General who works at the discretion of the President. He is tasked with implementing policy the President wants, whatever he thinks. I'm a little skeptical of how credible Petraeus will be although it might be completely moot whether he is or not (I'll tell you why later in this post) I always believed that the September report would purport to say that there IS progress even if there are some problems and that we should continue in Iraq: Republicans waverers who keep saying 'lets wait till the September report' will stop wavering. And they will 'give the strategy more time to work' and Democrats will be able to get less votes for any withdrawal resolution in Congress. I still believe this will happen.

Well, the propaganda (and lies) being repeated continuously, and bought hook-line-and-sinker, is that the surge has created progress.

For the love of God, the "respectable" General Petraeus went to Australia and pulled the biggest lie out of his ass: He made the absurd claim that there has been a 75% drop in ethnic and sectarian violence since the surge began!

You have got to be kidding me!?

And how have the Republicans responded to these fudged figures (and I will show why they are fudged)?

They declare "Iraq withdrawal is now off the table":

Leading Republicans in Congress on Thursday declared that troop withdrawal legislation should be scrapped because the United States has made significant progress in the Iraq War, just as Democrats were resuming efforts to bring soldiers home. "It should be off the table," House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio said of Democratic attempts to pass legislation to force President George W. Bush to withdraw some of the 168,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and wind down the combat mission there.

The Republican hardened stance followed months of speculation that September could usher in cooperation with Democrats on trying to craft a new Iraq policy. In recent months a small but growing number of Republicans have said it is time to develop a bipartisan strategy to bring troops home. (SNIP)

But Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky told reporters of "significant progress in Iraq," and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said the 4-1/2-year war effort was "finally paying dividends."

"We're at a crossroads. Pour it on. Seize the moment ... take withdrawal off the table," said Graham, who last month served in Iraq as a colonel in the U.S. Air Force reserves.

Next week Congress will hear from U.S. Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker. Both are expected to report significant military progress in Baghdad since the start of a troop surge last January.

Did I call it or did I freakin' call it?

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Do The Facts Fit the Propaganda?

Now, maybe I'm overreacting. Maybe I'm too cynical. Perhaps I've let my distrust of this Administration, its history of deceit....the fact that they fudge numbers all the time on everything from global warming data to deficit figures....well that they've falsified and fudged the July Surge report too....

...You know what these guys don't have credibility!! Screw that!

But, its not enough to rightfully point out their lack of credibility and their history of willingness to lie and distort figures to serve their goals; Lets actually examine if their claims are true

Has the Surge Succeeded in Bringing Progress?

Lets start with the absurd claim by the "honorable" General Petraeus that there has been a 75% drop due to the Surge.

Now, 75% is a huge number for violence to drop...one would almost expect things to look vastly different if it had really dropped that much. I haven't noticed that much of a change but who knows that could just be a matter of perception...so lets see what the actual stats say.

Associated Press, August 25, 2007

This year's U.S. troop buildup has succeeded in bringing violence in Baghdad down from peak levels, but the death toll from sectarian attacks around the country is running nearly double the pace from a year ago.

I'll add that it is hard to make comparisons from "peak levels" because certain seasons are more violent than others and so it is best to compare violence as compared to the same time the previous year. So, in that sense it is a little misleading to compare it to "peak levels." That's why the bolded part is a much better gauge than the leading part of the sentence that said its down from "peak levels."

Some of the recent bloodshed appears the result of militant fighters drifting into parts of northern Iraq, where they have fled after U.S.-led offensives. Baghdad, however, still accounts for slightly more than half of all war-related killings - the same percentage as a year ago, according to figures compiled by The Associated Press.

Many militants simply fled the capital (as expected), and there initially was a reduction in violence in Baghdad as violence in other parts of Baghdad where those militants fled to increased.

But I did only say "initially": As the AP's reports, its own statistics are now showing that the rate of killlings is at the same percentage as a year ago. And those are apples-to-apples comparisons (by same time last year).

In other words, violence has increased outside Baghdad, and stayed the same in Baghdad despite the Surge.

The tallies and trends offer a sobering snapshot after an additional 30,000 U.S. troops began campaigns in February to regain control of the Baghdad area. It also highlights one of the major themes expected in next month's Iraq progress report to Congress: some military headway, but extremist factions are far from broken.

That 'headway' is hardly headway in my opinion...

In street-level terms, it means life for average Iraqis appears to be even more perilous and unpredictable.

The AP tracking includes Iraqi civilians, government officials, police and security forces killed in attacks such as gunfights and bombings, which are frequently blamed on Sunni suicide strikes. It also includes execution-style killings - largely the work of Shiite death squads.

The figures are considered a minimum based on AP reporting. The actual numbers are likely higher, as many killings go unreported or uncounted. Insurgent deaths are not a part of the Iraqi count.

The findings include:

- Iraq is suffering about double the number of war-related deaths throughout the country compared with last year - an average daily toll of 33 in 2006, and 62 so far this year.

- Nearly 1,000 more people have been killed in violence across Iraq in the first eight months of this year than in all of 2006. So far this year, about 14,800 people have died in war-related attacks and sectarian murders. AP reporting accounted for 13,811 deaths in 2006. The United Nations and other sources placed the 2006 toll far higher.

- Baghdad has gone from representing 76 percent of all civilian and police war-related deaths in Iraq in January to 52 percent in July, bringing it back to the same spot it was roughly a year ago.

-According to the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, the number of displaced Iraqis has more than doubled since the start of the year, from 447,337 on Jan. 1 to 1.14 million on July 31.

However, Brig. Gen. Richard Sherlock, deputy director for operational planning for the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, said violence in Iraq ``has continued to decline and is at the lowest level since June 2006.''

He offered no statistics to back his claim.....

'And he offered no statistics to back his claim'!?

With an Administration that would be is desperate to give good news, don't you think they would be jumping at the change to provide good data if they had it?

They'd be throwing it in everyones face and all over the news but...they aren't. Instead they make claims with no proof and pleas to "just believe it" in essence. Plus the news organizations who are compiling the data are painting a much darker picture. Smells real fishy...

And the problem isn't only Baghdad and Central Iraq, the south is exploding too as different Shia groups also battle amongst themselves.

But a huge problem also looms in the south, the center of Shiite political and spiritual influence and the site of Iraq's main oil fields.

There are daily gunbattles between the Mahdi Army militia - loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr - and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the powerhouse Shiite political party that controls most of the bureaucracy and police forces in southern Iraq.

This month, the governors of two southern provinces loyal to the Supreme Islamic Council were killed in roadside bombings.

The clashes are expected to grow more intense as Britain draws downs its forces in southern Iraq over the coming months. The effect of the shrinking British presence is already being felt, said Cordesman in an assessment released Aug. 22.

``The end result was to turn the four provinces in southeastern Iraq over to feuding Shiite factions whose actions were mixed with corruption, extortion and links to criminal activities,'' he wrote

There is a good reason too note this. One not only because it points to increasing violence in Iraq, but because violence such as this is not counted as sectarian violence in Iraq, thus skewing those military numbers very much lower.

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Fudging The Numbers

One again, the Pentagon and the Administrations are fudging the numbers that go in their reports to paint a rosier picture than is deserved:

The U.S. military's claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.....

Others who have looked at the full range of U.S. government statistics on violence, however, accuse the military of cherry-picking positive indicators and caution that the numbers -- most of which are classified -- are often confusing and contradictory....

Senior U.S. officers in Baghdad disputed the accuracy and conclusions of the largely negative GAO report, which they said had adopted a flawed counting methodology used by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Many of those conclusions were also reflected in last month's pessimistic National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.

I'll do into the GAO (General Accountability Office) Report later. So what problems did the U.S. officers have with the GAO, the CIA and DIA's (Defense Intelligence Agency) methodology? That they didn't put up with this bullshit:

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."

You see the problem in that such a....well, retarded manner of differentiating criminal violence from sectarian violence naturally will drastically undercount the numbers dead from sectarian violence.

Remember that I asked you to keep the Shia vs. Shia violence in mind? Well here is why: [from same article]

According to a spokesman for the Baghdad headquarters of the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), those attacks are not included in the military's statistics. "Given a lack of capability to accurately track Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence, except in certain instances," the spokesman said, "we do not track this data to any significant degree."

Attacks by U.S.-allied Sunni tribesmen -- recruited to battle Iraqis allied with al-Qaeda -- are also excluded from the U.S. military's calculation of violence levels.

Did you get that? Shia vs. Shia (and Sunni vs. Sunni) violence is not added in the total for sectarian violence (although its supposed to because such fighting is part of a civil war), and the reason is because it's "hard to track". So they don't even mention it!! And then they can claim violence is down because they are not reporting substantial types of violence in their final tallies!

Plus they do not count the violence inflicted [on Sunni's, Shia's or anyone] by the Sunni groups who have recently decided to side with the US against al-Qaeda even though these groups are still players in the civil war, and will resume taking up arms against the US when it has weakened al-Qaeda. And these groups are part of the civil war for control of Iraq against Shias, Kurds and other Sunnis...yet their violence is not counted.

Want more? Apparently they also do not include car-bombs in the statistics of violence

The reason why will astounded me:

Car bombs and other explosive devices have killed thousands of Iraqis in the past three years, but the administration doesn't include them in the casualty counts it has been citing as evidence that the surge of additional U.S. forces is beginning to defuse tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

President Bush explained why in a television interview on Tuesday. "If the standard of success is no car bombings or suicide bombings, we have just handed those who commit suicide bombings a huge victory," he told TV interviewer Charlie Rose.

Others, however, say that not counting bombing victims skews the evidence of how well the Baghdad security plan is protecting the civilian population—one of the surge's main goals.

We don't count them because we will hand those bombers a victory if we do count them!? WTF!? Jeez, why should any violence in Iraq be counted if it will just give those killers a 'victory"?

Shoot, why did they claim a 75% drop in violence when they could have claimed a 100% drop in one?

Yet again, statistics are fudged and the counting of violence manipulate in a manner that seems to reduce the total numbers of violence reported. Clever...and deceptive.

Are you getting a better understanding how the military came to that "75% reduction" and why it is so at odd compared to everyone else's numbers?

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Other Factors of "Success" for the Surge

So clearly the military aspect of the Surge has failed which is funny because it is about the only part of the Surge that administration supporters and conservative hawks have proclaimed was a success. We know better though...

It's also funny because, at the outset, the "Surge" was supposed to achieve a more secure and peaceful environment through increased troop levels, in order to create a better environment for Iraqi politicians and groups to make political progress and gains for peace.

Has that happened: No.

So in that sense, even if it where true (and its not) that the surge has created some short term tactical progress, it is irrelevant because it has failed to bring about the political progress from Iraqi's that the Surge was supposed to help do.

In other words, a complete failure, so says the GAO report:

Iraq has failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress, according to a draft of a Government Accountability Office report. The document questions whether some aspects of a more positive assessment by the White House last month adequately reflected the range of views the GAO found within the administration.

The strikingly negative GAO draft, which will be delivered to Congress in final form on Tuesday, comes as the White House prepares to deliver its own new benchmark report in the second week of September, along with congressional testimony from Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker...

"While the Baghdad security plan was intended to reduce sectarian violence, U.S. agencies differ on whether such violence has been reduced," it states. While there have been fewer attacks against U.S. forces, it notes, the number of attacks against Iraqi civilians remains unchanged. It also finds that "the capabilities of Iraqi security forces have not improved."

"Overall," the report concludes, "key legislation has not been passed, violence remains high, and it is unclear whether the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion in reconstruction funds," as promised. While it makes no policy recommendations, the draft suggests that future administration assessments "would be more useful" if they backed up their judgments with more details and "provided data on broader measures of violence from all relevant U.S. agencies."

In other words if they did not cherry-pick positive indicators, eliminated negative-indicators from the final count. But this Admin has no compunctions with manipulating numbers to get the answers and results they want. And that's not just with Iraq.

I'll add that 3 out of 18 benchmarks is actually less than what the July Surge report showed when they showed 8 out of 18 were met. And even then (if you follow the link), I showed that even those 8 they claimed as success were not.

And what do you know: Apparently, even those 3 from the current GAO report have downsides as the GAO itself noted as well. Now that is not exactly a good assessment.

Surprisingly, most Americans are on their guard [Wash.Post/ABC News Poll] about the September Report due to be released on Tuesday September 11 (God, do those people have no shame?).

Most expect it to be manipulated and deceitful, and vast majorities say that even if the Admin reports progress, it would make no difference in making them support the war. Good.

Those Americans are basing it on a feeling (and I'm proud of them for that), but you who have read this far into this post know just how deceitful the conclusion to the September report will be.

There are tons of links there for you if you ever need a way to prove to others what a crock the report is...use them, direct them here...whatever. I'm just trying to do my part and hopefully I can help just one person do their part as well.

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Links I Didn't Use But For Reference

Letter to Congress demanding a sound counting of Iraq civilian casualties - From the National Security Network. A group of national security thinkers and practitioners have written a letter that expresses doubts - and reasons for them - of the new statistics.

Iraq stats 2006: The UN vs. the Iraqi Govt. - From TPMuckracker. They compile the UN's data and compare it to the Iraqi govts numbers. Not surprisingly, the Iraqi governments numbers were a lot lower.