The Fog of War The Washington Post reports on how the Bush administration uses numbers to present the rosiest possible view of the war. As the article points out, the numbers are impossible to verify, and therefore close to meaningless. Or they're just fundamentally artificial. For example:

According to a chart in last week's Pentagon assessment, the number of "Trained Iraqi Security Forces" now totals 328,700. A disclaimer noted that "the actual number of those present-for-duty soldiers is about one-half to two-thirds of the total due to scheduled leave, absence without leave, and attrition."

Hilarious, if it weren't so Orwellian. How can you count a soldier who's left due to "attrition"? (Apparently, without blinking an eye.) Next thing you know the Pentagon will modify that statistic to include soldiers who are, in fact, dead.

But here's a more meaningful statistic: estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians killed in the war range from 21, 000 to 60,000 to 600,000. It would seem an important number to know. Doesn't our seriousness (or lack thereof) about quantifying—and minimizing—this statistic reflect the nature of the war itself?  ¶ 7:45 AM