Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

U.S. officials have long been concerned about extrajudicial killings in Iraq, but until recently they have refrained from calling violent elements within the police force "death squads" -- a loaded term that conjures up the U.S.-backed paramilitaries that killed thousands of civilians during the Latin American civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s.

But U.S. military advisors in Iraq say the term is apt, and the Interior Ministry's inspector general concurs that extrajudicial killings are being carried out by ministry forces.

"There are such groups operating -- yes, this is correct," said Interior Ministry Inspector General Nori Nori.

And while satellite dishes and cell phones may give some indication of the economy, a more important measure is the production of oil. Knight-Ridder reports Iraq still cannot meet pre-war levels of oil production:

Insurgent attacks are costing Iraq about 500,000 barrels of oil a day, almost a third of its daily output. At today's oil prices, that's costing the country at least $28 million in export earnings every day.

...But since the March 2003 invasion, Iraqi oil production has failed to match the prewar level of 2.5 million barrels per day. Production briefly approached that level in March and April 2004, but insurgent attacks on pipelines, oil wells and other infrastructure have eroded output since then.

Sunni politicians campaigning is a good sign, but when they're been gunned down for doing so, "progress" hardly seems like the best word to describe it.

So for Lieberman, defining progress requires a very low bar. It also requires cherrypicking the measuring points, based not on reasonable factors of success (declining attacks, trained Iraqi forces, etc.), but on whatever he finds has been successful.

You see a lot of satellite dishes, so that's progress.

The low bar of success also affects Lieberman's view of the insurgency:

It is a war between 27 million and 10,000; 27 million Iraqis who want to live lives of freedom, opportunity and prosperity and roughly 10,000 terrorists who are either Saddam revanchists, Iraqi Islamic extremists or al Qaeda foreign fighters who know their wretched causes will be set back if Iraq becomes free and modern.

GlobalSecurity.org notes the insurgency is much larger:

In January 2005 Iraqi intelligence service director General Mohamed Abdullah Shahwani said that Iraq's insurgency consited of at least 40,000 hardcore fighters, out of a total of more than 200,000 part-time fighters and volunteers who provide intelligence, logistics and shelter.

That figure may be dated, but the point is there is not simply 10,000 fighters, but a network of civilians that aid the insurgency. Civilians whose hearts and minds we've lost.

Additionally, the description of the insurgency is misleading. Since recent research shows that foreign fighters make up about 4-10% of the insurgency, it's inaccurate to equate the al-Qaeda presence with the homegrown insurgency.

Dumbing down the insurgency into 10,000 terrorists may make for good speeches, but hardly reflects reality in Iraq.

Finally, Lieberman cites a poll:

While U.S. public opinion polls show serious declines in support for the war and increasing pessimism about how it will end, polls conducted by Iraqis for Iraqi universities show increasing optimism. Two-thirds say they are better off than they were under Saddam, and a resounding 82% are confident their lives in Iraq will be better a year from now than they are today.

Of course, if we're citing polls, we should also cite the poll that says over 80% of Iraqis want us out, and a majority thinks attacks on us are just fine.

I suspect we'll see the same talk from the President tomorrow. He'll cite roads being open, forces that have been trained, bases turned over. Maybe he'll lift a few lines from Lieberman's op-ed.  

But progress gained by lowering expectations isn't progress.

It's spin. It's propaganda.

Some things never change, I guess.