As Bush's Numbers Fall, Iraq Chaos Continues

Last week, Secretary of State Condolezza Rice made an "emergency" trip to Iraq. I haven't been able to find out precisely what the emergency was. The chaos in Iraq is the same that it has been for months, just increasingly worse. The only emergency I could think of was Bush's falling numbers; of course, the Bush Administration handles every difficulty with another round of photo ops and spin rather than a rational change in policy. I was gone last week and missed a description of Rice's trip; here's an article by Philip Shenon of The New York Times:

Wearing a helmet and a flak jacket and flanked by machine-gun-toting bodyguards to defend against insurgents, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came here Thursday, insisting that there were new signs of progress in Iraq and that the Bush administration had never sugarcoated its news about the American occupation.

“It is a quite critical time for the Iraqi government,” Ms. Rice said of the reasons for her brief unannounced visit to the Iraqi capital.

“What the American people see on their television screens is the struggle,” she said. “It is harder to show the political process that is going on at local levels, at provincial levels and indeed at the national level.” Iraqis, she said, are “making progress.”

(snip)

...signs of progress were not much in evidence in the first hours of her visit.

It began inauspiciously when the military transport plane that brought her to Baghdad was forced to circle the city for about 40 minutes because of what a State Department spokesman later said was either mortar fire or rockets at the airport.

On Thursday evening, during her meeting with President Jalal Talabani, the lights went out, forcing Ms. Rice to continue the discussion in the dark. It was a reminder of the city’s erratic — and sometimes nonexistent — electrical service.

She arrived in the midst of an especially bloody few days for American troops. At least 21 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq since Saturday, most in Baghdad. Two car bombings in the city on Thursday left at least four Iraqi civilians dead.

Condi Rice insists that the Bush Administration has not sugarcoated the problems in Iraq and yet the purpose of her trip was to insist that progress was being made despite the deteriorating situation. If the Bush Administration is not sugarcoating things, Rice fails to explain the discrepancy between Bush's figure of 30,000 civilian death, which he gave last December and has not yet updated, and the John Hopkins study of some 650,000 deaths.

The Canadian magazine, MacLeans has an article by Adnan R. Khan about an Iraqi whose job it is to collect the dead (hat tip to Today in Iraq):

Ali is a collector of the dead. That's his job, or at least one of them. He is also a cook at a kebab house in Baghdad and a member of the Mahdi Army, a Shia militia loyal to the militant cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. As a collector, his morbid duty is to sweep up the carnage of a sectarian war spiralling out of control -- one that Iraqi officials and their American overseers are trying desperately to downplay -- and quietly transport it to Iraq's main morgue, located in the heavily fortified Medical City in Baghdad's Bab al-Muatham neighbourhood, where all suspicious deaths are taken.

Every three days, Ali says, he and other al-Sadr militiamen go to the Tigris river to pick up bodies. At a spot on the bank just downstream from the Aima bridge in central Baghdad, a series of eddies gently gather in the dead. "More and more are coming there," Ali says, "from north of Baghdad, from villages like Taji and Balad. Many have their hands tied, most are blindfolded." The method of execution varies, Ali adds, from the basic bullet to the head to more macabre and viciously novel techniques involving power tools, electric cords and other such domestic instruments...

(snip)

Sectarian hostility aside, there is another aspect to Ali's work that is troubling: the deaths of the people whose bodies he pulls out of the river often go unreported, leading to questions about the real scale of the violence in Iraq. Even the wildly fluctuating official death counts are a stark reminder that Iraqi, and by association U.S. officials, are attempting to minimize a problem getting worse by the day. Earlier this year, the figures released by the government following the Feb. 22 bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, a Shia holy site, which has been cited as the spark that started the current round of killings, were suspiciously lower than numbers provided by morgue officials...

I don't want to get stuck on the number reported by the John Hopkins study; it's sufficient to know that Bush's numbers, disturbing as they are, do not approach what is likely the case. Mahablog has a good post about the issue:

Daniel Davies, better known to bloggers as Daniel of Crooked Timber, explains the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study on deaths in Iraq.

First, don’t concentrate on the number 600,000 (or 655,000, depending on where you read). This is a point estimate of the number of excess Iraqi deaths - it’s basically equal to the change in the death rate since the invasion, multiplied by the population of Iraq, multiplied by three-and-a-quarter years. Point estimates are almost never the important results of statistical studies and I wish the statistics profession would stop printing them as headlines.

The question that this study was set up to answer was: as a result of the invasion, have things got better or worse in Iraq? And if they have got worse, have they got a little bit worse or a lot worse. Point estimates are only interesting in so far as they demonstrate or dramatise the answer to this question.

The results speak for themselves. There was a sample of 12,801 individuals in 1,849 households, in 47 geographical locations. That is a big sample, not a small one.

(snip)

Most of the criticism coming from the Right Blogosphere amounts to “I don’t believe it,” albeit expressed in more colorful language and accompanied by ad hominem attacks on the researchers. ....

And here's another useful perspective by S.W. Anderson of Oh!Pinion; here's the part that quotes from an article and then discusses Bush's reaction to the John Hopkins study:

President Bush slammed the report Wednesday during a news conference in the White House Rose Garden. “I don’t consider it a credible report. Neither does Gen. (George) Casey,” he said, referring to the top ranking U.S. military official in Iraq, “and neither do Iraqi officials.”

“The methodology is pretty well discredited,” he added. (Watch Bush dismiss the report — 1:33 Video)

(snip)

You have to watch the video to fully appreciate the snide, almost sneering way our C-student president dismissed the study findings as “whatever they guessed at.”

To back up his own greater insight and wisdom, our White House Mr. Whizzered mentioned the sure to be impartial top U.S. general in Iraq. That would be the same general who’s been so sure all along that more troops would just be a drag on our operations. That would be the same general who owes his job and next promotion to — guess who?

The study projected a range of war-caused mortality in Iraq, from a low of 400,000 to a staggering high of 900,000. The 655,000 is considered the mostly likely total.

Note that the low end of the estimate is considered to be around 400,000 deaths. It's hard to escape the conclusion that Bush, Rice, Cheney and Rumsfeld have indeed sugarcoated what's going on in Iraq. If what is happening in Iraq can be called the birth pangs of democracy, it must be a new brand that hardly resembles the old brand. But that would assume that Bush is honest and articulate about what he is trying to accomplish. Given the corruption and cynicism of the White House and Congress that is increasingly evident, we are long past trusting what George W. Bush says.