Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Lies and damned lies. posted by Richard Seymour
Time for another Rumsfeld classic :Iraq is "statistically" no safer today than it was after Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was overthrown, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said.
Asked on BBC television whether Iraq was safer since the US-led invasion ended with the ouster of Saddam in April 2003, Rumsfeld replied: "Well, statistically no. But clearly it has been getting better as we've gone along."
"In other words, at the end of the war the army fled, was captured... and the country was defeated," Rumsfeld told veteran interviewer David Frost on BBC2's Newsnight.
"The insurgency then built over a period of time, and it has had its ups and downs," the US defense secretary said.
Rumsfeld added: "A lot of bad things that could have happened have not happened."
Leave aside the fact that the question is already loaded (asking the occupiers of Iraq whether it is safer than two years ago invites the supposition that the occupiers are not themselves a source of unsafety for Iraqis). Saying "statistically, no" is supposed to hint that the statistics may well be a fictitious construct, some idle confection of brainiacs and number-crunchers with little real referent. Adding that "it has been getting better as we've gone along" takes us beyond implication into an outright lie. On what basis does he say so? Well, we know that Rumsfeld has previously declared that his "metrics" and "indicators" were improving:
We have a room here, the Iraq Room where we track a whole series of metrics. Some of them are inputs and some of them are outputs, results, and obviously the inputs are easier to do and less important, and the outputs are vastly more important and more difficult to do.
We track, for example, the numbers of attacks by area. We track the types of attacks by area. And what we're seeing, for example, and one metric is presented graphically and it shows that we had spiked up during the sovereignty pass to the Iraqi people and spiked up again during the election, and are now back down to the pre-sovereignty levels which are considerably lower.
In other words, his case was based on precisely the sort of 'statistically, no' methods that he now abjures. To be fair, those comments were made at the end of March, before it became obvious that the war is not winding down , and before even US generals started to come out and say there is no military solution to the Iraqi resistance . But the question remains: how, now that Rumsfeld eschews the eggheads ways of old, is Iraq getting better? Mythopoeically? Perhaps some unknown knowns inform Rumsfeld's perspective. Teleologically? There may well be a hidden logic unfolding in the occupation of Iraq that is silently unfolding, with the soldiers mere puppets, subject to the cunning of reason. As unknown knowns are negated by known unknowns, Iraq is finally made peaceful in a total act of self-knowledge, in which all knowns are known and unknowns negated. Could be, but it sounds like bollocks. Ficitiously? Well, doesn't bear thinking about, does it?