Thank You

A comment here on Woodward's claims, with echoes of my wonderment at the disparity between the statements and the casualty rates (hat tip Instapundit):

Woodward seems to be exploiting the emotional reasoning of liberals who are perpetually enraged at Bush. When you are angry, the details don't matter. You'll accept any argument so long as it reflects badly on Bush. The New York Times pulled this same stunt about a month ago in an article reporting that attacks on American and Iraqi forces have doubled and claimed that the insurgency is clearly on the increase:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 The number of roadside bombs planted in Iraq rose in July to the highest monthly total of the war, offering more evidence that the anti-American insurgency has continued to strengthen despite the killing of the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

...

The insurgency has gotten worse by almost all measures, with insurgent attacks at historically high levels, said a senior Defense Department official who agreed to discuss the issue only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for attribution.

Just like Woodward is doing now, the New York Times chose to focus on a single statistic -- the number of attacks -- while ignoring the much more obvious indicators that they surely would have highlighted had they also shown a strengthening insurgency (the number of troops killed, the number wounded, the number killed by IEDs in particular, etc.). But since these obvious indicators point in the other direction (i.e., to a weakening insurgency), both the New York Times and Bob Woodward pretend that the following information does not exist:

...

On all 4 of these important dimensions, 2006 was slightly less violent than 2005. It's hard to reconcile that with hysterical claims of a secretly worsening situation caused by a strengthening insurgency. Woodward and the Times can get away with ignoring results like these (i.e., the relevant results) because they know that there is a large group of angry anti-Bush readers who are mentally prepared to uncritically accept their claims. Everyone's heard that "things are getting worse" in Iraq, so the claims that the insurgency itself is strengthening just makes perfect sense to them. They read, then they rage.

But it doesn't make sense. It's important to draw a distinction between the mostly Sunni insurgency that is fighting what they see as the US occupation of Iraq (and fighting for a better political posture once the situation finally stabilizes) and the Sunni-vs.-Shiite sectarian violence that you read about every day. Despite what Woodward wants you to believe, the insurgency shows no signs of gaining in strength (unless you preposterously zero in on one single statistic and completely ignore all of the much more relevant ones). What actually is worse this year in Iraq is sectarian violence, not the insurgency. Sectarian violence is not caused by the presence of American troops. Instead, even the editors of the New York Times understand that US troops are preventing Sunni-vs.-Shiite slaughter on a massive scale.

The claims--at least as stated in Friday's Today video that I posted on Friday night--don't make sense once you move past the sound byte into consideration of what else has to be going on for it to be true. The Professor is 100% right in saying that the actual numbers paint a different story with a different conclusion.