A senior U.S. Administration official briefed reporters today about the situation in Iraq and applied a spin heavier than any I've heard in Baghdad for a long time. True, security is much better in Iraq today than it was several months ago but this official went beyond what even military leaders would claim. In the meeting, held on the usual (but irritating) diplomatic ground rules that he/she not be identified by name, a reporter asked about the Iraqi government's ability to take advantage of the recent "lull in violence." The official jumped on the phrasing.
"This is not a, quote, lull in violence," the official insisted. "It is a steady decline, which one could track, plot on a graf, which I know [ military spokesman] Kevin Bergner has and you've probably seen, starting in December 2006 and projecting in virtually a straight, leveled averaged line down to this week in Iraq."
The official didn't stop there: "That's not a lull. That is a continuous decline in every metric of violence. Where spikes have occurred, those spikes have been related to developments on the ground, often to security advances or, in the negative sense, to a particularly spectacular Al Qaeda attacks. But the trend line has been, based on the plots I've seen, unaffected by that. It ain't a lull. It is a progressive decline that is now some 17 months in duration."
Setting aside whether you can logically discount things like "developments on the ground" and "spectacular Al Qaeda attacks" when assessing conditions here, the official's statement that the violence started dropping 17 months ago goes back further than I've heard others assert. It would mean the violence was dropping even before the troop surge, which was done for the purpose of reducing the violence.
I'm not sure exactly which military charts the official is referencing. But since the speaker claimed the backing of "every metric," I'll go with the most comprehensive chart offered by military spokesmen, which been updated frequently on this blog, the latest last week.
The graph clearly shows that the number of overall attacks in December, 2006, was in the middle of a gruesome climb to a peak of nearly 1,600 attacks a week in June, 2007. Then there is, indeed and thankfully, a steep drop that is largely reflected in what Iraqis say anecdotally. But if we're going to understand the Iraqi experience and the overall conditions here – both crucial as decisions are made for the future - it's worth noting that the downward trend is more like 10 months old instead of 17. And many of those months were still bloody by any normal standards.
