Until the NY Times Website decided to hide Paul Krugman, Thomas Friedman, and Maureen Dowd behind an annual subscription fee, I could always count on at least one good rant each week dissecting the incomprehensible spewing of commentary based on incomplete and/or inaccurate facts and figures.
Paul Krugman was particularly prone to “cherry picking” his numbers from various incompatible and dissimilar sources in order to support whatever socialist or leftist topic he chose to write about on any given day.
I honestly believe that the NY Times made the decision to charge to read Krugman and his cohorts often nonsensical ravings in order to eliminate the bloggers criticisms. The Times basically got tired of having to print corrections and retractions. They even lost a Public Editor partially as a result of their journalistic blunders.
Now I’m forced to ramble around the internet to places like the LA Times in order to find fodder and a writer to deliver a good lambasting to every now and then. This morning’s subject is Anthony H. Cordesman’s opinion piece entitled “Give the Defense Department an F” found in this morning’s edition of the LA Times online.
Mr. Cordesman works for some Washington DC think tank called the Center for Strategic and International Studies. After doing a little snooping around I learned that it is run by former Georgia US Senator Sam Nunn, so it can’t be all bad. Although Mr. Nunn was a Democrat, he was a Democrat in the moderate Zell Miller model rather than a Kerry/Kennedy/Dean wild eyed liberal lunatic. He did Georgia a great deal of good in his twenty odd years of service, as I recall.
Any way…
Mr. Cordesman’s takes issue with the validity of the DOD’s latest report to Congress entitled Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq.
Predictably, I started scratching my head as I read the opening to the editorial because Tony jumps right in and says that the DOD is either lying or is incapable of doing math, so I pulled up a copy of the report from the internet and took a gander at it myself.
Just as I suspected, either Mr. Cordesman is yet another ignorant, biased, partisan jackass with a political axe to grind, else he just needs a set of new batteries in his calculator along with some improved reasoning skills.
Don’t the editors of ANY major news publication EVER bother to check the facts underlying fundamental assertions made by their OP-Ed writers?
Mr. Cordesman opens with this discussion:
IF THE UNITED STATES is to win in Iraq, it needs an honest and objective picture of what is happening there. The media and outside experts can provide pieces of this picture, but only the U.S. government has the resources and access to information to offer a comprehensive overview.But the quarterly report to Congress issued May 30 by the Department of Defense, "Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq," like the weekly reports the State Department issues on Iraq, is profoundly flawed. It does more than simply spin the situation to provide false assurances to lawmakers and the public. It makes basic analytical and statistical mistakes, fails to define key terms, provides undefined and unverifiable survey information and deals with key issues by omission. It deserves an overall grade of F.
The report provides a fundamentally false picture of the political situation in Iraq and of the difficulties ahead. It does not prepare Congress or the American people for the years of effort that will be needed even under "best-case" conditions nor for the risk of far more serious forms of civil conflict. Some of its political reporting is simply incompetent. For example, the report repeatedly states that 77% of the Iraqi population voted in the December 2005 election. Given that the CIA estimates that almost 40% of the population is 14 or younger, there is no conceivable way that 77% of the population could have voted. The report says 12.2 million voters turned out. The CIA estimates Iraq's population is 26.8 million. This means roughly 46% of the population voted.
It seemed very strange to me that the Department of Defense could be guilty of making such a fundamental error or tell an outright lie in a document delivered to Congress, so I did a little fact checking of my own.
It only took about fifteen minutes to verify the assertions that the Iraqi population is about 26.8 million and that 39.7% (10.63 million) of the Iraqi population is 14 years old or younger, but what exactly does that have to do with
First, is Mr. Cordesman asserting that he believes that FIFTEEN year old kids had the right to cast a ballot in last December’s Iraqi election?
Second, what about the 2,050,000 registered Iraqi voters living in exile outside the country? Apparently he forgot them entirely in his analysis, and this error is substantially responsible for his flawed conclusions.
Finally, what I think Mr. Cordesman is tripping over is the lack of the words “eligible voters” in the DOD narrative, but I am at a loss as to why he could be thinking that they meant otherwise.
Doing a little more checking at the UNICEF web site I learned that they estimate that there are 13.5 million Iraqis under the age of 18, and that the median age (1/2 older and 1/2 younger) in Iraq is 19.7 years.
I couldn’t actually find online verification of the voting age, but based on our influence on the process and using the US suffrage as a model, I’d say that it is safe to assume that there were at LEAST 15.35 million eligible voters over the age of 17 in the election, so if 12.2 million actually voted, I calculate 12.2 divided by 15.35 to equal…drum roll please…
Seventy Nine Percent (79%)
The DOD says seventy seven percent (77%).
Hardly the gross misrepresentation that Mr. Anthony Cordesman would have us to believe it is, RIGHT?
So much for his opening argument.
I then suspected that the entire composition was full of crap and after reading through it a couple of times it is clear that his obviously biased, illogical commentary spirals downhill from here.
The far more serious problem, however, is the spin the report puts on the entire Iraqi political process. Political participation surely rose. But that wasn't because of acceptance of the new government or an embrace of a democratic political process; it reflected a steady sharpening of sectarian divisions, as Sunnis tried to make up for their decision to boycott earlier elections.The report touts a "true unity government with broad-based buy-in from major electoral lists and all of Iraq's communities." But its own data tell a different story. The one largely secular party won only 9% of parliament. The sectarian Shiite party, the United Iraqi Alliance, got 47%. The equally sectarian Sunni Iraqi Accordance Front got 16%, and the Kurdish Coalition got 19%. That hardly adds up to "unity."
Using Mr. Cordesman’s logic, the United State’s own political system is fatally flawed and doomed to failure because we have a Republican president and a House and Senate that is split 45/55 between Democrats and Republicans, with a few Libertarians, Independents, and Green Party Loons thrown in for good measure.
What about having fifty individual state governments, each divided within themselves by the Democrat/Republican/Libertarian/Independent party factions. And what does he think about the effect of having the African American’s in the Congressional Black Caucus running around carrying their own battle flag and agenda?
Would Mr. Cordesman consider the elections to be a success if the new Iraqi government consisted of only one or two parties?
Look at the conflict in Palestine resulting from having two competing parties. Slimly divided unity obviously does not guarantee stability.
Next...
The United States is making real progress in some aspects of building the Iraqi regular military. Yet there is still a tendency to promise too much, too soon, to understate the risk and the threat, and to disguise the fact that the U.S. must be ready to support Iraq at least through 2008 and probably through 2010.
Yaada...yaada...yack, yack, yack...
Funny thing, but aren’t we still in Germany in 2006, over 60 years after the end of WWII? And didn’t it take until 1989 with the fall of the Berlin wall to attain ultimate stability in Germany?
Why the rush, Mr. Cordesman?
The U.S. cannot afford to repeat the mistakes it made in Vietnam. Among them was dangerous self-delusion. The strategy President Bush is pursuing in Iraq is high risk. If it is to have any chance of success, it will require bipartisan persistence and sustained American effort. This requires trust, and trust cannot be built without integrity. That means credible reporting.
I’ll completely agree that we don’t need to repeat the mistakes made in Vietnam, but the failure in Vietnam was caused by executing the Murtha/Kerry plan of running out of the country before the job was done. The Chinese supported thugs from North Vietnam rushed into Siagon, changed the name to Ho Chi Men City, and slaughtered Millions in the ensuing racial cleansing.
Yeah...that seems like a plan here---NOT!
And by the way, Mr. Cordesman, I agree whole heartedly with the need for “CREDIBLE REPORTING”—and the problem starts and ends with people like you and the LA Times.
Don't YOU agree???
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