In his excellent Atlantic Monthly article on building an Iraqi army, James Fallows busts some administration spin about the extent of the violence there:
The first major attack on Iraq's own policemen occurred in October of 2003, when a car bomb killed ten people at a Baghdad police station. This summer an average of ten Iraqi policemen or soldiers were killed each day. It is true, as U.S. officials often point out, that the violence is confined mainly to four of Iraq's eighteen provinces. But these four provinces contain the nation's capital and just under half its people.
To illustrate the absurdity of this point, which the White House and Defense Department use frequently, imagine if there were a rebellion in the US and the government said, well, 41 out of 50 states are safe, and the unsafe states were California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Michigan, and Massachusetts, plus the District of Columbia. That's roughly half the US population and the nation's capital.
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