When it comes to violence in Iraq, much of the debate in the US has focused on whether it's declining and, if so, by how much. Certainly, this is of interest to political partisans as people seek to determine whether President Bush's troop surge is a success or a failure.
But lost in the domestic political calculation--this sad statistical gamesmanship that uses, primarily, Iraqi civilians as if they were casino tokens--is an open and representative picture of how many Iraqi civilians have been, and are continuing to be, injured and killed and by whom.
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The NY Times reports that the American military will begin relying more heavily on Iraqi government data, as troops levels begin to drop, in order "to gauge the level of violence and ultimately the effectiveness of the American strategy to stabilize the country."
The military's use of such data will prove more important since one of the factors skewing casualty data is a focus on American troop casualties. A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report said "attacks against Iraqi Security Forces and civilians have declined less than attacks against coalition forces.” It cautioned that “the incidents captured in military reporting do not account for all violence throughout Iraq. For example, they may underreport incidents of Shi’a militias fighting each other and attacks against Iraqi security forces in southern Iraq and other areas with few or no coalition forces.” Continuing violence "make[s] national dialogue challenging, and increasing levels of displacement are adding to an alarming humanitarian crisis.”
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Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) added that the data "and other figures on Iraqi civilian casualties -- do not cover large numbers of Iraqi wounded, most individual killings and disappearances; lesser forms of violence like beatings, threats and intimidation; and individual attacks on family members that are part of sectarian and ethnic cleaning and displacements."
Yet relying on Iraqi government data also has its drawbacks. Civilian victims of Iraqi government-initiated violence are not reliably counted. And given the problem of, for example, militia infiltration of Iraq's Interior Ministry, interested parties have political reasons for not reporting (or underreporting) civilian injuries and deaths.
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Perhaps the surge has helped reduce violence in Iraq although the reasons are not entirely clear. But the continued absence of political reconciliation, or "accommodation" as it's now termed, will probably only worsen an already unstable environment as the US begins its troop drawdown. How much time anyone has left, particularly Iraq's civilian population, is anyone's guess.
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2 comments:
How can we be sure the violence in Iraq actually is going down?
The sources are the Pentagon and the puppet government in Iraq. Neither have any credibility.
libhom:
I used GAO numbers primarily to underscore the failure of military reporting to capture other examples of violence in Iraq. I do not take them as gospel since there are question of how the statistics are compiled. Also, that violence has declined has been widely reported and attributed (by the AP today, for example), in part, to Shia militias such as Muqtada al-Sadr's avoiding engagement with the American military. On this basis, one can argue--and it is arguable--that the surge has helped reduce violence in Iraq toward American soldiers, if not Iraqi civilians.
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