The Daily Background

Brian Kilmeade of Fox & Friends, 10/26/07:

KILMEADE: Do you know something? Not one US military, uh, member of the military was killed in Iraq for the first time since 2004 this past week… almost no one’s talking about it… In Iraq, there were no casualties in the al Anbar province last week or in Iraq, US casualties, terrorist attacks have dropped 59 percent, sectarian attacks off 72 percent, IED attacks down 80 percent! It sounds like I’m making this up! If I had told you this a year ago, would you have said ‘I predicted this’?

Of course, Kilmeade was making up some of that, and he and his Faux compadres have been routinely predicting less violence in Iraq approximately every day since the war started.

But Kilmeade is right in a more general sense: violence is (for the moment) decreasing in Iraq. A reason to celebrate? Perhaps, but what’s more important is examining why this is the case. And a new GAO report suggests that reductions in violence are hardly good news because of what they’re indicative of.

In a hearing before the House Appropriations Committee today, Joe Christoff of the Government Accountability Office stated that this recent reduction in violence should be taken with a grain of salt, as it coincides with increased sectarian cleansing and a massive refugee displacement:

“I think that’s [ethnic cleansing] an important consideration in even assessing the overall security situation in Iraq. You know, we look at the attack data going down, but it’s not taking into consideration that there might be fewer attacks because you have ethnically cleansed neighborhoods, particularly in the Baghdad area […] It’s produced 2.2. million refugees that have left, it’s produced two million internally displaced persons within the country as well.”

Statistics without context are useless.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog