Iraq Phantom Count
Jim Gateway Pundit raises serious questions about the accuracy of no less than six recent mass casualty reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, including some that appear to have been manipulated by the enemy. The significance of this does not end with the fact that we can’t believe the news that’s reported, because in a democracy, the quality of our public policy decisions is only as good as the quality of our news. Our media have become accomplished at resisting perceived manipulation by the government, but as the Lebanon fiasco should have made clear, they’re still far too vulnerable to manipulation by terrorists. If the terrorists can manipulate our news, they can manipulate our public policy through the stupidest and shallowest among our leaders. Here, I refer to anyone (a, b, c) who would have us flee Iraq, leave it to al Qaeda and Iran to saw a jagged line through it, and suggest that doing so would “end this war.”
With violence in Iraq now at its lowest level since 2003 or 2004, it’s again possible to do some fact-checking of the Bilal Hussein version, which went unchallenged throughout 2004-2006. And of course, media reports may well have underreported some casualties, too, because the facts are hard to find and check on the battlefield, but also because al Qaeda and other insurgents didn’t want their atrocities reported. What these reports tell us is why, and how frequently, we should distrust casualty figures from media reports.
And we are still not finished. Iraq Body Count, which gets its numbers from — you guessed it — media reports is now well along on the way to becoming history’s second draft. Consider the broader implications these six reports suggest. How many false reports might have inflated Iraq Body Count’s numbers, or Lancet’s? Does anyone doubt that the left will try to write these questionable statistics into the history books?