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    the road to hell could at the very least have a very low legal speed limit..., 2006-10-02 15:20:17 | Main | sick sick sick sick sick..., 2006-10-03 18:52:10

    on those fancy little Brookings/NYT graphics on the State of Iraq:

    Juan Cole sez: " What follows is not an attack on persons, or valued colleagues. It is an attack on an intellectual framework." He continues:

    All along the way, these Brookings charts have been fantastically optimistic given the actual situation on the ground, and the whole idea that a country where there is no government to speak of and no indigenous army to speak of and 60,000 people a year being tortured, butchered and tossed mutilated in the streets by fanatical paramilitaries connected to government parties--that such a country is generating reliable statistics on employment and the economy is just a non-starter.

    The funny thing for me here is that when I get into arguments with folks who believe The Good News from Iraq is Being Obscured from Ocular Perception by the Fifth Columnists of Nike and Prescription Drug Advertisers, I always go to those little Brookings charts to help demonstrate how bad it is. They're doubly effective when you can recite from memory a string of pre-war figures that Brookings never gives you, because those make it look really bad: like "multi-fatality bombings" (pre-war: 0), or "US troop fatalities" (pre-war: 0), and my favorite, "cars registered by multi-fatality bombers" (pre-war: 0).


:: posted by buermann @ 2006-10-02 15:26:22 CST | link





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