[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 17]
[House]
[Pages 23682-23684]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     THE PRESIDENT'S WAR ASSESSMENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Washington (Mr.

[[Page 23683]]

McDermott) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, when the President arrived in Australia 
the other day, he told the prime minister, quote, ``We're kicking ass'' 
in Iraq. It is a clear sign that he intends to keep a massive U.S. 
military force in Iraq as long as he remains in office. And he will 
make it official administration policy next week. ``We're Kicking Ass 
in Iraq'' might be the headline of the report the White House is 
writing for General Petraeus to deliver to the Congress next week.
  It is supposed to be an objective military assessment, but the 
President has declared it will be a White House spin document, as 
usual. Here's what the President's ``kick ass'' assessment translates 
to on the ground: 10 U.S. soldiers killed this week; 793 U.S. soldiers 
killed so far this year; 3,752 U.S. soldiers killed since the beginning 
of the war; and 27,186 U.S. soldiers wounded since the beginning of the 
war. And, 71,000 documented Iraq civilian deaths since the beginning of 
the war, although the actual number is much higher.
  As the Times of India newspaper said today, Iraq is getting worse day 
after day after day. We don't even know how bad things really are.
  The ACLU filed a lawsuit the other day demanding the U.S. release 
military documents concerning the number of innocent civilians killed 
by the U.S. forces. They fear the government is hiding the human cost 
of war. We don't know, but reliable information does exist.
  There is plenty of factual information for the President to rely on, 
but he won't. An independent commission of retired U.S. generals 
released a report today that concludes that the Iraqi national police 
force is so corrupt the force should be disbanded. These U.S. military 
experts concluded that Iraq's Army over the next 18 months, ``Cannot 
yet meaningfully contribute to denying terrorists safe haven.''
  The GAO released its own independent study showing the Iraq 
Government has reached only 3 of the 18 benchmarks established as part 
of the U.S. continuing to fund the war. In case anyone thinks that 
achieving 3 of 18 isn't too bad, let me tell you what they are.
  The first benchmark we achieved was passing a law that legally 
protects the rights of minority parties in Iraq. Except the minority 
Sunni population remains outside the political situation totally. The 
other 2 benchmarks the Iraqi Government achieved was setting up 
security and public relations offices to support the military 
escalation. But the White House will use the military brass to paint a 
much rosier picture next week in its report to the Congress.
  Besides the kick-ass assessment by the President, there have been 
recent reports trying to bolster the administration's position. I enter 
into the Record at this point a story appearing in today's Washington 
Post. It's on page 16, but it ought to be on page 1. The headline is: 
``Experts Doubt Drop in Violence in Iraq. Military Statistics Called 
Into Question.'' I urge everyone to read this important news story. The 
only conclusion one can reach is, here we go again.

               [From the Washington Post, Sept. 6, 2007]

Experts Doubt Drop in Violence in Iraq--Military Statistics Called Into 
                                Question

                           (By Karen DeYoung)

       The U.S. military's claim that violence has decreased 
     sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from 
     many experts within and outside the government, who contend 
     that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and 
     selectively ignore negative trends.
       Reductions in violence form the centerpiece of the Bush 
     administration's claim that its war strategy is working. In 
     congressional testimony Monday, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, 
     the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is expected to cite a 75 
     percent decrease in sectarian attacks. According to senior 
     U.S. military officials in Baghdad, overall attacks in Iraq 
     were down to 960 a week in August, compared with 1,700 a week 
     in June, and civilian casualties had fallen 17 percent 
     between December 2006 and last month. Unofficial Iraqi 
     figures show a similar decrease.
       Others who have looked at the full range of U.S. government 
     statistics on violence, however, accuse the military of 
     cherry-picking positive indicators and caution that the 
     numbers--most of which are classified--are often confusing 
     and contradictory. ``Let's just say that there are several 
     different sources within the administration on violence, and 
     those sources do not agree,'' Comptroller General David 
     Walker told Congress on Tuesday in releasing a new Government 
     Accountability Office report on Iraq.
       Senior U.S. officers in Baghdad disputed the accuracy and 
     conclusions of the largely negative GAO report, which they 
     said had adopted a flawed counting methodology used by the 
     CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Many of those 
     conclusions were also reflected in last month's pessimistic 
     National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.
       The intelligence community has its own problems with 
     military calculations. Intelligence analysts computing 
     aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE 
     puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, 
     sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence 
     official in Washington. ``If a bullet went through the back 
     of the head, it's sectarian,'' the official said. ``If it 
     went through the front, it's criminal.''
       ``Depending on which numbers you pick,'' he said, ``you get 
     a different outcome.'' Analysts found ``trend lines . . . 
     going in different directions'' compared with previous years, 
     when numbers in different categories varied widely but 
     trended in the same direction. ``It began to look like 
     spaghetti.''
       Among the most worrisome trends cited by the NIE was 
     escalating warfare between rival Shiite militias in southern 
     Iraq that has consumed the port city of Basra and resulted 
     last month in the assassination of two southern provincial 
     governors. According to a spokesman for the Baghdad 
     headquarters of the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), those 
     attacks are not included in the military's statistics. 
     ``Given a lack of capability to accurately track Shiite-on-
     Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence, except in certain 
     instances,'' the spokesman said, ``we do not track this data 
     to any significant degree.''
       Attacks by U.S.-allied Sunni tribesmen--recruited to battle 
     Iraqis allied with al-Qaeda--are also excluded from the U.S. 
     military's calculation of violence levels.
       The administration has not given up trying to demonstrate 
     that Iraq is moving toward political reconciliation. 
     Testifying with Petraeus next week, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq 
     Ryan C. Crocker is expected to report that top Shiite, Sunni 
     and Kurdish leaders agreed last month to work together on key 
     legislation demanded by Congress. If all goes as U.S. 
     officials hope, Crocker will also be able to point to a visit 
     today to the Sunni stronghold of Anbar province by ministers 
     in the Shiite-dominated government--perhaps including Prime 
     Minister Nouri al-Maliki, according to a senior U.S. official 
     involved in Iraq policy. The ministers plan to hand Anbar's 
     governor $70 million in new development funds, the official 
     said.
       But most of the administration's case will rest on security 
     data, according to military, intelligence and diplomatic 
     officials who would not speak on the record before the 
     Petraeus-Crocker testimony. Several Republican and Democratic 
     lawmakers who were offered military statistics during Baghdad 
     visits in August said they had been convinced that Bush's new 
     strategy, and the 162,000 troops carrying it out, has 
     produced enough results to merit more time.
       Challenges to how military and intelligence statistics are 
     tallied and used have been a staple of the Iraq war. In its 
     December 2006 report, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group 
     identified ``significant underreporting of violence,'' noting 
     that ``a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an 
     attack. If we cannot determine the sources of a sectarian 
     attack, that assault does not make it into the data base.'' 
     The report concluded that ``good policy is difficult to make 
     when information is systematically collected in a way that 
     minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.''
       Recent estimates by the media, outside groups and some 
     government agencies have called the military's findings into 
     question. The Associated Press last week counted 1,809 
     civilian deaths in August, making it the highest monthly 
     total this year, with 27,564 civilians killed overall since 
     the AP began collecting data in April 2005.
       The GAO report found that ``average number of daily attacks 
     against civilians have remained unchanged from February to 
     July 2007,'' a conclusion that the military said was skewed 
     because it did not include dramatic, up-to-date information 
     from August.
       Juan R.I. Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University 
     of Michigan who is critical of U.S. policy, said that most 
     independent counts ``do not agree with Pentagon estimates 
     about drops in civilian deaths.''
       In a letter last week to the leadership of both parties, a 
     group of influential academics and former Clinton 
     administration officials called on Congress to examine ``the 
     exact nature and methodology that is being used to track the 
     security situation in Iraq and specifically the assertions 
     that sectarian violence is down.''
       The controversy centers as much on what is counted--attacks 
     on civilians vs. attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops, numbers of 
     attacks vs. numbers of casualties, sectarian vs. intrasect 
     battles, daily numbers vs. monthly averages--as on the 
     numbers themselves.

[[Page 23684]]

       The military stopped releasing statistics on civilian 
     deaths in late 2005, saying the news media were taking them 
     out of context. In an e-mailed response to questions last 
     weekend, an MNF-I spokesman said that while trends were 
     favorable, ``exact monthly figures cannot be provided'' for 
     attacks against civilians or other categories of violence in 
     2006 or 2007, either in Baghdad or for the country overall. 
     ``MNF-I makes every attempt to ensure it captures the most 
     comprehensive, accurate, and valid data on civilian and 
     sectarian deaths,'' the spokesman wrote. ``However, there is 
     not one central place for data or information. . . . This 
     means there can be variations when different organizations 
     examine this information.''
       In a follow-up message yesterday, the spokesman said that 
     the non-release policy had been changed this week but that 
     the numbers were still being put ``in the right context.''
       Attacks labeled ``sectarian'' are among the few statistics 
     the military has consistently published in recent years, 
     although the totals are regularly recalculated. The number of 
     monthly ``sectarian murders and incidents'' in the last six 
     months of 2006, listed in the Pentagon's quarterly Iraq 
     report published in June, was substantially higher each month 
     than in the Pentagon's March report. MNF-I said that 
     ``reports from un-reported/not-yet reported past incidences 
     as well as clarification/corrections on reports already 
     received'' are ``likely to contribute to changes.''
       When Petraeus told an Australian newspaper last week that 
     sectarian attacks had decreased 75 percent ``since last 
     year,'' the statistic was quickly e-mailed to U.S. 
     journalists in a White House fact sheet. Asked for detail, 
     MNF-I said that ``last year'' referred to December 2006, when 
     attacks spiked to more than 1,600.
       By March, however--before U.S. troop strength was increased 
     under Bush's strategy--the number had dropped to 600, only 
     slightly less than in the same month last year. That is about 
     where it has remained in 2007, with what MNF-I said was a 
     slight increase in April and May ``but trending back down in 
     June-July.''
       Petraeus's spokesman, Col. Steven A. Boylan, said he was 
     certain that Petraeus had made a comparison with December in 
     the interview with the Australian paper, which did not 
     publish a direct Petraeus quote. No qualifier appeared in the 
     White House fact sheet.
       When a member of the National Intelligence Council visited 
     Baghdad this summer to review a draft of the intelligence 
     estimate on Iraq, Petraeus argued that its negative judgments 
     did not reflect recent improvements. At least one new 
     sentence was added to the final version, noting that 
     ``overall attack levels across Iraq have fallen during seven 
     of the last nine weeks.''
       A senior military intelligence official in Baghdad deemed 
     it ``odd'' that ``marginal'' security improvements were 
     reflected in an estimate assessing the previous seven months 
     and projecting the next six to 12 months. He attributed the 
     change to a desire to provide Petraeus with ammunition for 
     his congressional testimony.
       The intelligence official in Washington, however, described 
     the Baghdad consultation as standard in the NIE drafting 
     process and said that the ``new information'' did not change 
     the estimate's conclusions. The overall assessment was that 
     the security situation in Iraq since January ``was still 
     getting worse,'' he said, ``but not as fast.''

  We're kicking ass is the kind of assessment you'd hear at a football 
game, and the PR game is clearly on by this President and his minions. 
They will claim progress next week and tease the American people with 
talk of token U.S. troop reductions. But because it's coming from this 
White House, the only thing certain about next week is that it will be 
their latest attempt to try to mislead us into believing there are 
enough bullets and bombs, money, and U.S. blood to prevail in Iraq.
  The best military in the world is being run into the ground by this 
President. That's the only truth the evidence supports. Don't believe 
anything else. The American people had it right in November, and they 
still have it right today.
  The U.S. must end its occupation. There is no other choice for this 
country, except to continue to shed the blood of our people and waste 
the resources of this country in Mr. Bush's failure.

                          ____________________