Counting Bodies
By Michael Goldfarb
WorldwideStandard.com
The Washington Post runs an extremely confused story today on "the number of unidentified bodies found on the streets of the capital," which the Post says stands at 453 for the month of June, a 41 percent rise over May.
Of course, that's the lead, and the story runs under the headline "Body Count in Baghdad Up in June," but every other statistic reported in the piece shows that the the number of attacks, mass-casualty and otherwise, has fallen since the start of the new Baghdad Security Plan.
The Post reports:
<<< But even before the plan went into effect, the number of bodies discovered had fallen well below the levels of last fall. In October, for instance, 1,782 unidentified bodies were found in Baghdad, according to the United Nations, citing official statistics provided by the Health Ministry.
By January, the total dropped to 321 in the capital, according to the statistics provided to The Washington Post, followed by 294 in February, 272 in March and 182 in April. But the figure spiked upward to 433 in May and 453 last month....
The statistics provided by the Health Ministry official put the number of civilian fatalities in June across Baghdad and other provinces at 2,097, excluding the three that make up the northern Kurdish region, which is more peaceful. This number is 34 percent lower than the 3,190 civilian deaths the ministry recorded in January, but above a low point reached in April, when 1,664 civilians died, according to the official....
One trend that is easier to track is the deaths from widely reported mass-casualty bombings -- often suicide car bomb attacks that are the hallmark of Sunni insurgent groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq. In June, the number of deaths from such bombings -- individual attacks that killed at least 20 people -- dropped to its lowest level of the year, 134 fatalities, according to a Post analysis. >>>
So assuming these unofficial numbers are correct--the Post also reports that Iraqi television "said that in June, 1,227 civilians died violently in Iraq, a decrease of 36 percent compared with May"--every other metric indicates progress. But that is still a big assumption. Official statistics coming from the Health Ministry have been historically unreliable--the ministry was run by Sadr loyalists until April, and the vice minister was arrested in February--and the fact that the Post chooses to rely on an unnamed official from that ministry rather than official government numbers is unexplained.
But across Iraq, fatalities and mass-casualty attacks are down sharply from where they were at the beginning of the year--prior to the start of the new plan. There may have been a modest rise in the number of bodies found in the capital over the last two months, and that isn't good news, but the Post does little to put such a number in context.
General Petraeus is quoted in the article as saying "I tend to think al-Qaeda is public enemy number one, and unfortunately, you know, it's the one that really sort of gave the raison d'etre for militias. It becomes the justification for an awful lot of what is done by the Shia extremists, Shia militias." Well, the Post story would still seem to lend credence to the view that the Coalition is making progress against 'public enemy number one,' which is a necessary precondition for reducing sectarian violence.
There's plenty of bad news to report from Iraq, but this story seems to be a bit of a reach...the only reliable statistic that the Post can produce indicates real progress against al Qaeda in Iraq, everything else just looks like a shot in the dark--an unnamed official from an unreliable ministry who may be pushing an unknown agenda. Readers should take it with a grain of salt, even if the Post doesn't.
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