Marion Barry logic

The much awaited Petraeus Report, you know the one being drafted by the White House, will show a sharp decrease in sectarian violence. The report, unfortunately, is based on “cherry picked” data. I know what you are thinking, how could the Administration deceive the country about something so important and why would a General sign onto something like this? To which I say, fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly and Dick Cheney’s gotta drink the blood of infants. Since Colin Powell is no longer available, carrying Bush’s water is now Petraeus’s gig. So how does the Post define cherry picking? How about this:

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."

"Depending on which numbers you pick," he said, "you get a different outcome."

I should say. Or this:

Among the most worrisome trends cited by the NIE was escalating warfare between rival Shiite militias in southern Iraq that has consumed the port city of Basra and resulted last month in the assassination of two southern provincial governors. 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.

Natch - why would any of that count? Then there is this:

A senior military intelligence official in Baghdad deemed it "odd" that "marginal" security improvements were reflected in an estimate assessing the previous seven months and projecting the next six to 12 months. He attributed the change to a desire to provide Petraeus with ammunition for his congressional testimony.

The intelligence official in Washington, however, described the Baghdad consultation as standard in the NIE drafting process and said that the "new information" did not change the estimate's conclusions. The overall assessment was that the security situation in Iraq since January "was still getting worse," he said, "but not as fast."

So, at best, we have slowed the rate of Iraq's disintegration. Hardly a ringing endorsement of the surge.

Look, the bottom line is that this Administration lied us into this war and continues to lie about the efficacy of their war policy. Now, the goal seems to be to change how one measures the success of same. As the old saying goes, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Or to put it another way, you could go with former D.C. Mayor Marion Berry’s infamous remark describing the level of crime in the District:

If you take out the killings, Washington actually has a very very low crime rate.

Un-huh. And one could say the same about Baghdad.