Stats and Jack

Zev Chafets:

LISTENING to Rep. John Murtha's arguments against the American troop surge in Iraq reminds me of a scene in "Bananas."

Facing an insurgency, the Latin American dictator in that Woody Allen classic reaches out for American aid. But he mistakenly calls in not the CIA, but the UJA - the United Jewish Appeal. Black-hatted rabbis, holding little charity boxes, are soon wandering through the chaotic battle zone.

Like the dictator, Murtha is confused about what does and doesn't work during a sectarian bloodbath.

"The latest polls show that 91 percent of Sunni Iraqis and 74 percent of Shia Iraqis want the U.S. forces out of Iraq," Murtha told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month. "In January 2006, 47 percent of Iraqis approved of attacks on U.S.-led forces. When the same polling question was asked just 8 months later, 61 percent of Iraqis approved of attacks on U.S-led forces."

The congressman has repeated these statistics again and again in his effort to convince his colleagues to oppose the surge. Look at how many Sunnis want U.S. forces out, how many Shiites approve of killing Americans, how many Iraqis disapprove of their own leaders . . I've got the numbers right here, scientific as a Con Ed meter reading and twice as authoritative.

This is the sheerest nonsense. In today's (or yesterday's) Iraq, independent pollsters have as much chance of gathering genuine data as rabbis have of collecting donations from Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites.

The problem isn't unique to Iraq. It holds for opinion surveys in any society ruled by kinship, secrecy and fear of outsiders - in other words, almost every country in the Middle East.

...

Other polls have shown the opposite results. But the evidence that Murtha is wrong is out in the open for anybody who will look to see. In Anbar province where the Sunnis are dominant, the Sunni Sheiks are on our side and have gotten their tribes to contribute people to the security forces. This development since August of 2006 has been noted in several stories. As for the Shia, they dominate the government and they are asking us to stay. Murtha is looking for excuses to leave in defeat before we finish our victory and any statistics he chooses will be colored by that agenda.