Re: Surrealism in Washington
On Nov 29, 2006, at 11:13 AM, Michael Pugliese wrote:
http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/061016iraqcivil.pdf Look at the data here. Given how far the death toll has accelerated and all the leaks about approaches to the Sunni leadership, how can one be sure that the “Salvador Option, ” of empowering the Shiite death squads has been USG policy for a while now? The reportage of Peter Maas on this was eons ago now.
The other week, Leninology cited a BBC account, based on U.S. DoD
figures, showing the vast majority of attacks in Iraq were on
coalition forces, not civilians. However, Cordesman says of that data
series in this report:
This calculation, however, ignores the fact that these provinces
include the majority of the Sunni population – a clear measure of civil war. Moreover, it
is based on a massive undercount of actual violence, since it does not [include] many, if
not most, low level incidents where the source of an attack cannot be confirmed, and makes no
effort to estimate “softer” forms of ethnic and sectarian violence like intimidation
and non-violent ethnic cleansing. While not meaningless, this count is so narrowly defined
as to grossly understate the level of civil conflict in Iraq.
Iit makes sense that the Pentagon would count attacks on it more
carefully than it would count attacks on civilians. It’s not only a
matter of what they care about - it’s also what they know about. The
army knows when it’s shot at, but how would they ever know if a
couple of Sunnis shoot up a couple of Shias, or vice versa? So that
data source seems less than reliable.
Doug