Sep
11
Michael Winship
A journalist I know who has spent a lot of time in Iraq tells the story of talking to an American infantry major in Baghdad the day Saddam’s statue was toppled in Firdos Square, almost four and a half years ago.
He asked, “What now?” The officer replied, “I expect our job is over.” He thought thousands of military police immediately would be airlifted in to patrol the streets of Baghdad. “We can’t do that with our tanks and Bradley’s and howitzers,” the major reasoned. “We’re not equipped to do that.” Surely, he believed, the United States government, which he so proudly served, had a plan.
But Washington didn’t. And so there was rampant, unchecked looting, and then the sectarian violence, insurgency, bloodshed and terrorism that traumatize Iraq to this very day.
Throughout, the Bush administration has misinterpreted or cooked or hidden the numbers that tell the real story: the number of attacks, the number of suicide bombings, the numbers of civilian dead and wounded. For politicians and generals, statistics (as I have quoted an old British truism here before) are like a lamppost to a drunk — used more for support than illumination.