"We recently found two mobile biological weapons facilities which were capable of producing biological agents." - George W. Bush, fibbing on 6/5/2003

Sometimes it seems that it would be far simpler to catalog the truths that the Bush Administration has told about Iraq;  nonetheless, Congressman Henry Waxman of California (one of my faves) has compiled Iraq On The Record, a useful list of "misleading statements" (i.e., lies) told by the Bushies in their quest to prove their collective manhoods.

Two very amusing song parodies, with videos:

Papa's Got A Brand New Baghdad

Folk Songs of the Far Right

I just read that there were 16,912 murders in the US in all of 2005.

Baghdad alone had 1,398 murders last month, not including soldiers or civilian victims of explosions - so that number does not include car bombs and IEDs. If we assume only (only!) 15 more deaths by bombs or of soldiers per month (and 50 people were killed in Baghdad in just one day of car bombing in February, and 5 more just today, so it's a conservative guess), that brings the total to 1413 last month - and rising monthly.
Extrapolating that to a full year, this comes to 16,956 per year. By itself, Baghdad's surpasses the entire US in murders. Not just murder rate - but number of murders. (The murder rate is 50 times higher in Baghdad vs. the entire US).

Baghdad, a city of 6 million people, now has more murders than our entire 300-million-person country. And it's getting worse by the month.

Why haven't we seen this in the media?

Apparently a Republican Congressman from Iowa, Steve King, is wandering around claiming that Iraq currently has a lower violent death rate than many US cities.  He claims a violent death rate of 25.71 for Iraq, which would put the death rate lower than New Orleans (56.0 per 100,000 in 2004), Baltimore (43.5), Detroit (42.1), Washington D.C. (35.8) and Atlanta (26.0).

If King's number was accurate, that is.

It is occasionally the case that statistics (particularly Right-wing statistics) are inaccurate, so, being a numbers guy, I decided to roll up my sleeves and dig into his number.  So I spent a few minutes going over the Iraq Index to count the number of violent deaths in Iraq last month (April). I then divided that into the population of Iraq, and I got around 40 deaths per 100,000 per year, almost twice what King claims.

Thanks to an astute contributor to The Democratic Underground, I was alerted to a great resource from the Brookings  Institute: The Iraq Index - Tracking Variables of Reconstruction & Security in Post-Saddam Iraq.

Are attacks increasing or decreasing?  How about oil production?  50 pages of sad but interesting statistics - recommended reading.

Foul Rumsfeld's just announced a possible 5% US troop reduction in Iraq.  Being a numbers guy, this got me thinking: is this really a reduction, or just another game with numbers in order to placate The People?

A quick Google found this article from January 12, 2005.  Two interesting points can be seen:

1. At that time we had just increased the number of troops to 150,000 ahead of of the January 30 elections.  For last week's elections, we beefed up to 160,000 troops.  If the local Iraqi forces are actually getting more capable, then why would we need an extra 10,000 of our people this time?  Seems to me that either the situation is getting worse, or the Iraqi forces are getting less capable - in any case, the actual numbers are not a hopeful trend.