Statistics are like bikinis…

When Congressperson Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) had her pontificating premier on national television at the Iraq Hearings with General Petaeus and Ambassador Crocker she brought up a poll released that had just before the hearings opened.

She had her staff running back and forth looking for something to low ball Gen. Petraeus with and she found this poll from ABC-BBC-NHK (BTW did you know the NHK is known as the Anime News Station?). She was one of the last questioners and she was aware that neither Gen. Petraeus nor Amb. Crocker had any one running an on going news clipping service for them. C-SPAN has a video of her smarmy question.

Let’s dissect this “poll”.

According to FoxNews:

The poll was conducted August 17 to 24 and involved face-to-face interviews in Arabic or Kurdish with 2,212 randomly chosen adult Iraqis from across the country. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

That’s 368 interviews a day. That’s a little over 3 per day for the 117 interviewers. There would be no activity on any Friday Islam’s Sabbath. In a country with a curfew and travel restrictions, electricity two hours a day, a populace suspicious of outsiders . ABC explains how the poll was conducted HERE. You make up your own mind as to the validity. I am afraid that in a war zone I would not be inviting strangers into my house yet they are claiming 65% cooperation rate this is higher than they get in the US. This was also during the Shia pilgrimage to the Kadhimiya shrine. Mosul was under curfew from 6 p.m. to 3 p.m. Fallujah banned all cars and was under curfew from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. Read the report and the methodology for yourself.

BBC. It is the fourth such poll in which BBC News has been involved, with previous ones conducted in February 2004, November 2005 and February 2007.

Dr. Toby Dodge, who was involved in running the poll, pointed to the fact that so many Iraqis saw no improvement to their safety since the US deployed an extra 30,000 troops this year, bringing their number up to nearly 170,000.

This is the same “expert” who in 2003 prior to the war said in response to the question, “Can I ask you what would you see as the possible scenarios now for the way the war will go?”

I think, they’re very bleak. I think most people have been surprised by the tenacity of defence in the south. You have ordinary conscript soldiers – most of them Shiites – and they've been fighting very, very hard against invading American troops. Now, there are two reasons for that: one would be that Baghdad has de-centralised their commander control, so these troops are being directly ordered from generals quite close to them. But I think secondly and more worryingly for the United States, is that these troops are fighting for a higher ideal. Now I would argue they hate Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein is in no way popular, but they're fighting for Iraqi nationalism against a foreign invader and that means if these kind of rank and file, the lowly paid, badly trained are fighting this hard, by the time you get to where American forces are at the moment, on the outskirts of Baghdad, when you come across the better armed, the better trained, the highly-motivated troops of the Republican Guard and the Special Republican Guard, there's going to be a hell of a fight. (Author’s Note: History proved him wrong)

In Feb 2007 he stated:

The entrance of US troops into Baghdad in April 2003 resulted in the death of the Iraqi state. Faced with the widespread lawlessness that is common after violent regime change, the US did not have the numbers of troops needed to control the situation. After three weeks of violence and looting, the state’s administrative capacity was destroyed….

Dr. Toby Dodge seems to speak from both sides of his mouth. What is very clear is that he is NOT impartial. Toby Dodge is a senior research fellow at the ESRC Centre for the Study of Globalization at the University of Warwick, England, and an associate fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London. He has acted as a consultant on Iraq for ABC News and has written for The Guardian. He is coeditor, with Stephen Simon, of Iraq at the Crossroads: State and Society in the Shadow of Regime Change and, with Richard Higgott, of Globalization and the Middle East: Islam, Economics, Society, and Politics. October 5, 2006 Toby Dodge stated his opinion that, “Iraqi insurgents, as opposed to transnational jihadists, would also be encouraged to take part by giving them what they have long demanded, the removal of US forces from the streets of Iraq’s cities.” (From reading Toby’s articles I have formed my opinion that in Toby’s mind he is never wrong, but anyone who fails to listen to him is always wrong.)

I really need to get a life because I read all 34 pages of the survey report. The thing that jumped out at me was the fact that for some reason the survey says that the Shiite Muslims only represent 48% of the population with Sunnis comprising 33% and Kurds 16% and “others” 3%. This goes against the latest CIA statistics as the report mentions. Also the report claims that — “Acceptability of attacks on U.S. forces also varies by locale, peaking at 100 percent in Anbar.” This is the province where the US had it’s biggest successes with the local population?????

Based on Gen Petraeus’ report and his charts, this “fact” screams, “LIE!”

Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.
~Aaron Levenstein

Statistics can be made to prove anything – even the truth.
~Author Unknown

See also: The Most Shockingly Misleading Poll in History