Iraq, the unraveling (XII): Bombs away

OK, I'll explain for him.

This is a mindless catchphrase intended to invalidate personal experience. But it has an important kernel of truth.

Individual experiences can be far from the norm. If you decide something like how a war is going based on the experience of one person, you might easily be wrong. Think about WWII from the viewpoint of one soldier during the Battle of the Bulge, for example....

How do we draw general conclusions? Ideally we would get lots of data from lots of places, and put it together, carefully noting which of it is important. So for example an enemy might concentrate his attention on a national capital. If there are ten thousand terrorist incidents in the capital but 99% of the country is peaceful that doesn't average out. The capital is important. On the other hand an enemy might disperse his efforts. If there are ten incidents per day in every part of the city except the capital but the capital is heavily patrolled and calm, then you don't want to disregard that either. There's an art to deciding which information to ignore.

In iraq we have the problem that all of our data is utterly unreliable. There is no verification. For awhile the US military collected data and reported fitfully. Unfortunately our military sometimes lies about such things because they don't want to do things that would hurt the war effort, and sometimes the truth hurts.

At some point a lot of the data collection got transferred to the CPA, which was utterly incompetent to collect data and dishonest to boot.

Then it shifted to the iraqi government, which is like the CPA but less honest and less competent.

Is it unreasonable to suppose there might be somebody in the iraqi government who occasionally tells the data collection guys "Report 200 terrorist incidents regardless how many there actually are" or "Report 10 incidents" based on their political advantage? No, it's probable. One of the points of giant car bomb attacks that wound hundreds of people is that they are likely to be reported. If a terrorist/insurgent/etc cares about what gets reported in the iraqi media or the american media, one incident that wounds or kills 200 people is worth a hundred thousand times as much as 100 incidents that wound or kill 2 people each. The hundred incidents turn into background noise that will be completely ignored.

There are no foreign journalists in iraq tracking down reports and checking whether they are true. It mostly does not happen. Very occasionally it does happen. Somebody will pay a lot of money to go and check things. "Take me to the Abu Qial mosque." The handlers take them to a mosque, and they photograph the walls outside the mosque which are only pockmarked and then report to the USA that the Abu Qial mosque was reported completely destroyed but they have proven it was instead completely undamaged. Anecdotal evidence indicates that news out of iraq is unreliable.

How do we know what's actually happening in iraq? We do not. We don't know about small things and we don't know about large things. Note for example the record of the iraqi army. We have been building the iraqi army for 5 years or so. After 2 years we reported it was building nicely, but then it turned out it had mostly melted away. After 3 years it was building nicely, but it melted away again. After 4 years the iraqi army worked well enough that they could do independent operations provided they were stiffened by US units and provided with US close air support and strategic bombing and had US ground forces to do the hard parts. How good are they now? Who knows? It might make a difference also whether they are following US or iraqi orders. Units that seem quite incompetent when foreigners give them orders they consider immoral might stiffen up when their own commanders give them a chance to protect their nation. But this is hypothetical.

We went literally years with the US Army lying or confused about how many iraqi soldiers there were and what they were capable of. Why would we believe them about anything now? They are confused liars. I want to believe they collect accurate data for their own planning but lie extensively about it to the media. But I'm afraid their own data might be so bad they don't know when they're lying.

Who can we trust about iraqi news? Nobody.

Anecdotal information is not reliable. It tells you something that is happening but can give no indication how often that sort of thing happens. Statistical information is also unreliable. It is provided by unreliable sources.

The main data point we can rely on is that after 6 years of occupation iraq is still unsettled to the point that foreign journalists do not feel safe investigating outside the Green Zone, and there is no independent corroboration of any news.

That's negative data and I regard it as a strong negative indication for our eventual success.

. . . these aren't primarily attacks against US govn. forces. According to the Gospel of St. Kilcullen, insurgencies use violence in close coordination with specific propaganda aims. I'd like to know what those are. "Once the Americans have left, the Iraqi govn. can't protect you, so you better choose a side to support," perhaps?