"A lot of the numbers throughout his speech spin reality almost out of control,"

War Data Cited by Bush Are Debatable


By Doyle McManus / Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON — President Bush offered only a few pieces of specific evidence Sunday to support his assertion that "we are winning the war in Iraq." And like so much in Iraq, even those are hotly debated.

The president said more than 126 Iraqi combat battalions were now engaged in "fighting the enemy" and "more than 50 are taking the lead."

Those numbers are based on current Pentagon estimates of Iraqi troop strength, officials said. An Iraqi battalion includes about 600 men. So Bush's estimate of 126 Iraqi battalions in combat would add up to about 76,000 men, about half the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.

And during a Nov. 30 address at the U.S. Naval Academy, Bush estimated that 40 Iraqi battalions were "in the lead."

But "taking the lead" does not mean an Iraqi unit is fully capable of fighting on its own. In U.S. military parlance, an Iraqi unit can "take the lead" when it is capable of launching combat operations with the help of U.S. support and logistics.

"When we say 'in the lead,' we mean putting them in charge, still with our transition teams and still with our enabling support," Army Gen. George W. Casey, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, told reporters last week. "So it's different than being operating totally independently."

Only one Iraqi battalion is currently listed at Level 1, capable of fully independent operations, officials said. The 50 battalions Bush cited are listed at Level 2.

On one point, the president appeared to have offered a conservative estimate: He said the United States had "transferred more than a dozen military bases to Iraqi control." Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Dec. 8 that "about 17 [military bases] have actually been turned over."

Bush also quoted selectively from recent opinion polls to suggest that Iraqis were satisfied with the course of events in their country. "Seven in 10 Iraqis say their lives are going well, and nearly two-thirds expect things to improve even more in the year ahead," he said.

He was quoting almost verbatim from the findings of a recent poll in Iraq that was sponsored jointly by ABC News, Time magazine and other news organizations.

But the same poll had findings that Bush left out: Fewer than half of Iraqis — 46% — said their country was better off than it was before the war; half said it was wrong for the United States to invade in 2003. Two-thirds said they opposed the continued presence of U.S. troops, and almost half said they would like to see U.S. forces leave soon.

"A lot of the numbers throughout his speech spin reality almost out of control," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has been generally supportive of Bush's strategy in Iraq.

"He's cherry-picked numbers and I think rounded them up … [he's] ignored all the negatives," Cordesman said on National Public Radio, referring to the polling results.