Scoring the Iraq aftermath.

• Author: O'Hanlon, Michael

HOW CAN WE tell if we are making progress in Iraq or not? If you already know what answer you want, it is easy to find someone to provide it. If you oppose the war, locate a prominent Democrat; if you prefer good news, find a Bush Administration official. In both cases, you are likely to hear accurate but, alas, highly selective and incomplete data. How do we move beyond the war of competing factoids to assess actual progress and to know when policies need to be adjusted?

One of the main obstacles to this is that the Bush Administration has been suffering from a perceptions gap of its own making. Prior to the war, administration officials frequently portrayed post-Saddam Iraq as a land of milk, honey, oil and bouquets being thrown at the feet of American soldiers as they packed their bags to head home quickly after the war. Another obstacle to a clear understanding of postwar Iraq, however, is the media. Negative news reports about individual acts of violence that are not placed in perspective by reporters, political analysts or the public at large greatly complicate matters. What is needed, therefore, is a framework within which we can assess trends over time, suggesting a means of monitoring future progress.

To be sure, this approach has its limitations, and they are stark. The Vietnam experience should remind us that assessing progress in any counterinsurgency through use of statistical measures is dangerous: the data can be incomplete, wrong or simply unrepresentative of actual progress in the broader political struggle that any counterinsurgency operation must wage. Body counts and estimates of "crossover points" at which one is killing the enemy faster than it can regenerate its ranks are particularly problematic. (1) But by establishing as broad a portfolio of data as possible, scrutinizing it for accuracy and remembering caveats about how it should be interpreted, one can still do better with data than without it.

The War of the Factoids

IS THE counterinsurgency and nation-building mission in Iraq going well or badly? There is substantial evidence on both sides of this question. That fact, plus the high political stakes in play as a presidential campaign approaches, explain why there is such discord in the national debate on the subject.

Clearly the Iraq mission today is encountering difficulties. Four tragic bombings dominated the August news, killing the UN's top administrator in Iraq and one of the country's most important moderate political leaders. A Governing Council member, Akila al-Hashimi, was assassinated in September, and a deputy mayor of Baghdad was killed in late-October. Oil outflows were slow to resume in quantity and remained below pre-war levels six months after the fall of Saddam. Economic opportunity in Iraq continues to be mediocre for most and unemployment remains high. By September, more Americans had died since May 1, when President Bush landed on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to declare major combat operations over, than during the overthrow of Saddam, and the toll has continued since. Attacks on U.S. forces have steadily increased in number. Increasing ambushes of supply convoys and greater use of improvised explosive devices by Iraqi insurgents were among the more disturbing trends of the late summer and early fall. Synchronized truck bombs in Baghdad and a rocket attack on the Al-Rasheed hotel while Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was staying there in late-October capped off a month in which U.S. troop casualties from hostile fire reached a level not seen since July. And according to comments in early-October by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, head of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, "The enemy...