The Iraqi Numbers Game

Body counts are back. The Washington Post's Ellen Knickmeyer has a front-page story today about how U.S. military officials are claiming success in Iraq, using body counts as their proof of success.

If this sounds very Vietnam, well it is. Burned by reliance on body counts during that conflict, the Pentagon officially got out of the body count business around the time the last helicopter left Saigon.

The Post story was chock full of interesting statistical tidbits: "Over 17 days this month, guerrillas across Iraq killed at least 116 Iraqi forces and 346 Iraqi civilians in drive-by shootings, bombings and other violence, according to Iraqi officials," for example. Or: "Twenty-five members of Ansar al-Sunna killed themselves and others in suicide attacks last month, [a member] said, and 53 volunteers for suicide attacks have arrived since."

But for my money the heart of it all is:

After generally rejecting body counts as standards of success in the Iraq war, the U.S. military last week embraced them -- just as it did during the Vietnam War. As the carnage grew in Baghdad, U.S. officials produced charts showing the number of suspects killed or detained in offensives in the west.

Lynch, the military spokesman, cited killings and detentions of 1,534 insurgents in the region. The fact that the number of insurgents killed or captured in the northern city of Tall Afar was roughly equal to advance estimates of their strength, he said, was proof that insurgents weren't simply escaping to fight another day -- and that U.S. forces were doing more than razing infrastructure. "Zarqawi is on the ropes," Lynch told reporters.

We managed to figure out exactly how many Iraqi insurgents there are and kill or detain precisely that many? How convenient.

It was not clear, however, how many of those detained or killed in the offensives were insurgents. Since 2003, U.S. forces have detained 40,000 people, twice U.S. generals' highest public estimate of the number of fighters in the insurgency. On Saturday, the Iraqi government said it had released for lack of evidence more than 500 of the 757 suspects detained in ongoing operations in the northern city of Mosul.

Oh.