Pentagon tracking a whole series of metrics in Iraq
Tuesday, 9 October 2007
Tom Engelhardt in the concluding part his article
PREPARE not to be surprised: In Iraq, the military counted bodies from the beginning -- counted, in fact, everything. They just weren't releasing the figures back in the days when the Bush administration was less desperate about Iraq and far more desperate not to appear to be back in the Vietnam era of endless stats and no victory. But the "metrics" (as they are called) were always something of an open secret. In March 2005, for instance, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told an NPR reporter:
"We have a room here [in the Pentagon], the Iraq Room where we track a whole series of metrics. Some of them are inputs and some of them are outputs, results, and obviously the inputs are easier to do and less important, and the outputs are vastly more important and more difficult to do.
"We track, for example, the numbers of attacks by area. We track the types of attacks by area…. [W]e track a number of reports of intimidation, attempts at intimidation or assassination of government officials, for example. We track the extent to which people are supplying intelligence to our people so that they can go in and actually track down and capture or kill insurgents. We try to desegregate the people we've captured and look at what they are. Are they foreign fighters, Jihadist types? Are they criminals who were paid money to go do something like that? Are they former regime elements, Ba'athists? And we try to keep track of what those numbers are in terms of detainees and people that are processed in that way.... We probably look at 50, 60, 70 different types of metrics, and come away with them with an impression."
And as it happens, though he didn't mention it that day, the military were also assiduously counting corpses. We know that because last week they released figures to USA Today on how many insurgents U.S. forces have supposedly killed since the invasion of Iraq ended: 18,832 since June 2003; 4,882 "militants" so far in 2007 alone. That represents a leap of 25% in corpse-counting from the previous year. These previously derided body counts, according to American officials quoted in Stars and Stripes, now give the necessary "scale" and "context" to the fight in Iraq.
As the USA Today report points out, last year Centcom Commander John Abizaid had suggested that the forces of the Sunni insurgency numbered in the 10,000-20,000 range. If the released figures are accurate, nearly 25%-50% of that number must have been killed this year. (Who knows how many were wounded.) Add in suspected Sunni insurgents and terrorists incarcerated in American prisons in Iraq only in the "surge" months of 2007 -- another 8,000 or so -- and it suddenly looks as if something close to the full insurgency has essentially been turned into a ghost resistance between January and September of this year.
(Again, Vietnam had its equivalents. After the nationwide Tet Offensive in February 1968, for instance, the U.S. military requested more troops from the Johnson administration. They also claimed that the Vietnamese had lost 45,000 dead. As historian Marilyn Young wrote in her book, The Vietnam Wars, "UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg wanted to know what was enemy troop strength at the start of Tet. The answer: between 160,000 and 175,000. And the ratio of killed to wounded? Estimated at three and a half to one, answered the officer. 'Well, if that's true,' Goldberg calculated quickly, 'then they have no effective forces left in the field.' This certainly made additional American forces seem redundant.")
By now, it seems as if everyone on the American side is suddenly counting in public. In August, the President, for the first time, felt free to become the leader of a "body-count team" and proudly announced, in a televised speech to the American people, just how many insurgents U.S. forces were supposedly killing in each surge month (though the figures don't gibe with the ones released by the military last week): "Our troops have killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists every month since January of this year." General Petraeus, of course, arrived in Washington to deliver his "progress report" to Congress with his own Vietnam-style multicolored charts and graphs to display; and the military, having sworn not to do body counts, is now releasing figures daily -- often large ones -- on kills in Afghanistan and Iraq that regularly make the headlines. And every day, it seems, new Pentagon databases and squads of number-crunchers are revealed. By now, it's a genuine carnage party.
Last week, Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reported in far greater depth than we've seen before on the metrics squads run out of the Pentagon and the U.S. command in Baghdad. In the process, she found some interesting discrepancies between the findings of the Pentagon's data analysts and those working for Petraeus -- "Civilian casualty numbers in the Pentagon's latest quarterly report on Iraq last week, for example, differ significantly from those presented by the top commander in Iraq…" -- and this became the subject of much on-line analysis at sites like ThinkProgress.org and TalkingPointsMemo.com. But perhaps more interesting than these discrepancies was the size of the overall military counting operation.
DeYoung, for instance, interviewed Chief Warrant Officer 3 Dan Macomber, the "senior all-source intelligence analyst" in charge of a six-person team whose only task is "to compile [data] and track trends and analysis for General Petraeus" personally. And that team, in turn, is but a small part of a larger crew "far from the battlefield" that, DeYoung reports, includes "platoons of soldiers in Iraq and at the Pentagon… assigned to crunch numbers -- sectarian killings, roadside bombs, Iraqi forces trained, weapons caches discovered and others -- in a constant effort to gauge how the war is going."
Think of that for a moment. "Platoons" of military counters trying to count their way so high on a pile of Iraqi corpses and captured weapons that, someday, "progress" and even perhaps a glimmer of "success" might appear at the end of that dark, dark tunnel. That would be when, assumedly, the "stability" we represent would finally make its appearance. What Iraq would be by then is another matter entirely.
Why would such "platoons" of counters be needed? One answer might be that the counting runs high indeed. On Monday, there was a revealing inside-the-fold piece in the New York Times on this subject. It was, on the surface, a modest good-news piece from a distinctly bad-news land. While the central government in Baghdad is now almost paralyzed, wrote James Glanz, its corrupt ministries unable to spend even small percentages of the oil moneys allotted to them for various reconstruction activities, local spending in some provinces may be significantly more effective (or, if you read the piece to the end, it may not). Here was the key passage:
"The capital budget for the entire country, including the provinces, was $6 billion in 2006 and $10 billion in 2007. But some national ministries spent as little as 15 percent of their share last year, citing problems such as a shortage of employees trained to write contracts, the flight of scientific and engineering expertise from the country and the danger from militias and the insurgency."
Think about that: "a shortage of employees trained to write contracts…"; "the flight of scientific and engineering expertise from the country…" There's something worth counting, but you might be doing it for a long, long time. Significant parts of what was once a large Iraqi professional class have, since the occupation, become "bus people." They have fled the country in unknown numbers -- though a recent Oxfam report indicates that, in Baghdad, some hospitals and universities have lost up to 80% of their staffs. These are part of a larger exodus of staggering dimensions. It is now estimated -- nobody knows the real numbers -- that there are at least 2.5 million Iraqis who have fled abroad since the Bush administration's invasion ended. Up to 2.2 million more Iraqis have been dislodged from their homes, largely by sectarian violence, and turned into internal refugees.
And then, of course, there were the Iraqis who couldn't flee -- those corpses everyone is now so hot to count, so eager to measure progress upon. As in June 2006 with the door-to-door study that became the Lancet report, which suggested that 600,000 Iraqis might have died violently since the invasion of 2003, we have another survey of the dead. Again, it offers startling figures; and, once again, those figures, though produced by a reputable British survey outfit, ORB or Opinion Research Business, which has been polling in Iraq since 2005, were largely ignored in the mainstream media. As Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. wrote in a moving essay at his libertarian website, LewRockwell.com:
"How comfy we are all in the United States, as we engage in living-room debates about the US occupation of Iraq, whether 'we' are bringing them freedom and whether their freedom is really worth the sacrifice of so many of our men and women. We talk about whether war aims have really been achieved, how to exit gracefully, or whether we need a hyper-surge to finish this whole business once and for all.... But when 'we' cause the calamity, suddenly there is silence."
A sample of 1,499 Iraqis 18 years old and up were asked: "How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (i.e. as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof." Nearly one of every two Baghdad households claimed to have lost a family member and the firm estimated that, overall, approximately 1.2 million Iraqis may have died violently since the invasion, which, if true, would put even the Rwandan genocide in the shade. Other estimates of Iraqi deaths are lower, but still staggering.
And that's just the dead. Not the wounded. Not the mentally damaged or the shell-shocked or the deranged. Not those thousands in northern Iraq who are now coming down with cholera, thanks to worsening sanitary conditions and the unavailability of potable water. There -- in a country which may have lost 1.2 million people to violence in four-plus years -- is where our leading presidential candidates, many pundits (liberal as well as conservative), and significant numbers of Congressional representatives agree we must remain in some form beyond at least 2013, for reasons of "stability," lest a "genocide" occur.
If the polls are to be believed, here in this country only the American people disagree, and they obviously don't count for much.
So while we hunker into Iraq, the numbers-crunchers will undoubtedly redouble their efforts for the next "progress report," upcoming in March 2008, from General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. They are undoubtedly already preparing their bar charts and multi-colored graphs. Out in the field, the pressure on the troops to provide the stats that will make those graphs reflect "progress," that will allow units to achieve "success" and commanders to advance, will only increase.
The lesson of these last metrics-filled surge months is already clear enough: We count, they don't. (Concluded) (Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.)
-- TomDispatch
PREPARE not to be surprised: In Iraq, the military counted bodies from the beginning -- counted, in fact, everything. They just weren't releasing the figures back in the days when the Bush administration was less desperate about Iraq and far more desperate not to appear to be back in the Vietnam era of endless stats and no victory. But the "metrics" (as they are called) were always something of an open secret. In March 2005, for instance, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told an NPR reporter:
"We have a room here [in the Pentagon], the Iraq Room where we track a whole series of metrics. Some of them are inputs and some of them are outputs, results, and obviously the inputs are easier to do and less important, and the outputs are vastly more important and more difficult to do.
"We track, for example, the numbers of attacks by area. We track the types of attacks by area…. [W]e track a number of reports of intimidation, attempts at intimidation or assassination of government officials, for example. We track the extent to which people are supplying intelligence to our people so that they can go in and actually track down and capture or kill insurgents. We try to desegregate the people we've captured and look at what they are. Are they foreign fighters, Jihadist types? Are they criminals who were paid money to go do something like that? Are they former regime elements, Ba'athists? And we try to keep track of what those numbers are in terms of detainees and people that are processed in that way.... We probably look at 50, 60, 70 different types of metrics, and come away with them with an impression."
And as it happens, though he didn't mention it that day, the military were also assiduously counting corpses. We know that because last week they released figures to USA Today on how many insurgents U.S. forces have supposedly killed since the invasion of Iraq ended: 18,832 since June 2003; 4,882 "militants" so far in 2007 alone. That represents a leap of 25% in corpse-counting from the previous year. These previously derided body counts, according to American officials quoted in Stars and Stripes, now give the necessary "scale" and "context" to the fight in Iraq.
As the USA Today report points out, last year Centcom Commander John Abizaid had suggested that the forces of the Sunni insurgency numbered in the 10,000-20,000 range. If the released figures are accurate, nearly 25%-50% of that number must have been killed this year. (Who knows how many were wounded.) Add in suspected Sunni insurgents and terrorists incarcerated in American prisons in Iraq only in the "surge" months of 2007 -- another 8,000 or so -- and it suddenly looks as if something close to the full insurgency has essentially been turned into a ghost resistance between January and September of this year.
(Again, Vietnam had its equivalents. After the nationwide Tet Offensive in February 1968, for instance, the U.S. military requested more troops from the Johnson administration. They also claimed that the Vietnamese had lost 45,000 dead. As historian Marilyn Young wrote in her book, The Vietnam Wars, "UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg wanted to know what was enemy troop strength at the start of Tet. The answer: between 160,000 and 175,000. And the ratio of killed to wounded? Estimated at three and a half to one, answered the officer. 'Well, if that's true,' Goldberg calculated quickly, 'then they have no effective forces left in the field.' This certainly made additional American forces seem redundant.")
By now, it seems as if everyone on the American side is suddenly counting in public. In August, the President, for the first time, felt free to become the leader of a "body-count team" and proudly announced, in a televised speech to the American people, just how many insurgents U.S. forces were supposedly killing in each surge month (though the figures don't gibe with the ones released by the military last week): "Our troops have killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists every month since January of this year." General Petraeus, of course, arrived in Washington to deliver his "progress report" to Congress with his own Vietnam-style multicolored charts and graphs to display; and the military, having sworn not to do body counts, is now releasing figures daily -- often large ones -- on kills in Afghanistan and Iraq that regularly make the headlines. And every day, it seems, new Pentagon databases and squads of number-crunchers are revealed. By now, it's a genuine carnage party.
Last week, Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reported in far greater depth than we've seen before on the metrics squads run out of the Pentagon and the U.S. command in Baghdad. In the process, she found some interesting discrepancies between the findings of the Pentagon's data analysts and those working for Petraeus -- "Civilian casualty numbers in the Pentagon's latest quarterly report on Iraq last week, for example, differ significantly from those presented by the top commander in Iraq…" -- and this became the subject of much on-line analysis at sites like ThinkProgress.org and TalkingPointsMemo.com. But perhaps more interesting than these discrepancies was the size of the overall military counting operation.
DeYoung, for instance, interviewed Chief Warrant Officer 3 Dan Macomber, the "senior all-source intelligence analyst" in charge of a six-person team whose only task is "to compile [data] and track trends and analysis for General Petraeus" personally. And that team, in turn, is but a small part of a larger crew "far from the battlefield" that, DeYoung reports, includes "platoons of soldiers in Iraq and at the Pentagon… assigned to crunch numbers -- sectarian killings, roadside bombs, Iraqi forces trained, weapons caches discovered and others -- in a constant effort to gauge how the war is going."
Think of that for a moment. "Platoons" of military counters trying to count their way so high on a pile of Iraqi corpses and captured weapons that, someday, "progress" and even perhaps a glimmer of "success" might appear at the end of that dark, dark tunnel. That would be when, assumedly, the "stability" we represent would finally make its appearance. What Iraq would be by then is another matter entirely.
Why would such "platoons" of counters be needed? One answer might be that the counting runs high indeed. On Monday, there was a revealing inside-the-fold piece in the New York Times on this subject. It was, on the surface, a modest good-news piece from a distinctly bad-news land. While the central government in Baghdad is now almost paralyzed, wrote James Glanz, its corrupt ministries unable to spend even small percentages of the oil moneys allotted to them for various reconstruction activities, local spending in some provinces may be significantly more effective (or, if you read the piece to the end, it may not). Here was the key passage:
"The capital budget for the entire country, including the provinces, was $6 billion in 2006 and $10 billion in 2007. But some national ministries spent as little as 15 percent of their share last year, citing problems such as a shortage of employees trained to write contracts, the flight of scientific and engineering expertise from the country and the danger from militias and the insurgency."
Think about that: "a shortage of employees trained to write contracts…"; "the flight of scientific and engineering expertise from the country…" There's something worth counting, but you might be doing it for a long, long time. Significant parts of what was once a large Iraqi professional class have, since the occupation, become "bus people." They have fled the country in unknown numbers -- though a recent Oxfam report indicates that, in Baghdad, some hospitals and universities have lost up to 80% of their staffs. These are part of a larger exodus of staggering dimensions. It is now estimated -- nobody knows the real numbers -- that there are at least 2.5 million Iraqis who have fled abroad since the Bush administration's invasion ended. Up to 2.2 million more Iraqis have been dislodged from their homes, largely by sectarian violence, and turned into internal refugees.
And then, of course, there were the Iraqis who couldn't flee -- those corpses everyone is now so hot to count, so eager to measure progress upon. As in June 2006 with the door-to-door study that became the Lancet report, which suggested that 600,000 Iraqis might have died violently since the invasion of 2003, we have another survey of the dead. Again, it offers startling figures; and, once again, those figures, though produced by a reputable British survey outfit, ORB or Opinion Research Business, which has been polling in Iraq since 2005, were largely ignored in the mainstream media. As Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. wrote in a moving essay at his libertarian website, LewRockwell.com:
"How comfy we are all in the United States, as we engage in living-room debates about the US occupation of Iraq, whether 'we' are bringing them freedom and whether their freedom is really worth the sacrifice of so many of our men and women. We talk about whether war aims have really been achieved, how to exit gracefully, or whether we need a hyper-surge to finish this whole business once and for all.... But when 'we' cause the calamity, suddenly there is silence."
A sample of 1,499 Iraqis 18 years old and up were asked: "How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (i.e. as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof." Nearly one of every two Baghdad households claimed to have lost a family member and the firm estimated that, overall, approximately 1.2 million Iraqis may have died violently since the invasion, which, if true, would put even the Rwandan genocide in the shade. Other estimates of Iraqi deaths are lower, but still staggering.
And that's just the dead. Not the wounded. Not the mentally damaged or the shell-shocked or the deranged. Not those thousands in northern Iraq who are now coming down with cholera, thanks to worsening sanitary conditions and the unavailability of potable water. There -- in a country which may have lost 1.2 million people to violence in four-plus years -- is where our leading presidential candidates, many pundits (liberal as well as conservative), and significant numbers of Congressional representatives agree we must remain in some form beyond at least 2013, for reasons of "stability," lest a "genocide" occur.
If the polls are to be believed, here in this country only the American people disagree, and they obviously don't count for much.
So while we hunker into Iraq, the numbers-crunchers will undoubtedly redouble their efforts for the next "progress report," upcoming in March 2008, from General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. They are undoubtedly already preparing their bar charts and multi-colored graphs. Out in the field, the pressure on the troops to provide the stats that will make those graphs reflect "progress," that will allow units to achieve "success" and commanders to advance, will only increase.
The lesson of these last metrics-filled surge months is already clear enough: We count, they don't. (Concluded) (Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.)
-- TomDispatch