Monday, May 01, 2006

3 Years After Mission Accomplished

Think Progress has an article Mission Accomplished by the Numbers which lists various statistics from Bush's infamous speech on that aircraft carrier compared to now. It has things like US Troops killed and wounded, number of insurgent attacks, and approval ratings. I usually find such things manipulative (and this is no exception) but still the numbers are pretty damning.

I would have preferred if they didn't use ranges in some of the numbers to make them scan differently. Writing "7,000-9,000" for Iraqi Security forces next to "250,500" makes the 30x increase seem smaller. I would have believed it was just a coincidence but the next line does the same thing in reverse: "5,000" insurgents then vs "15,000-20,000" now which makes it seem bigger than the 3-4x increase it is. These numbers are rounded anyway, so averaging the ranges to 8,000 and 17,500 would have been fine.

Think Progress also has Mission Botched with some numbers from polling Iraqi citizens in late March 2006. They're not happy either.

Also for the 3 year anniversary we have Colin Powell saying he advised more troops and Condi Rice saying she doesn't remember that.

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