Iraq War's Statistics Prove Fleeting

The number of enemy losses, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told The Washington Post about 2 1/2 years into the war, is "a metric that can help convey magnitude and context" after a battle. Military officials said the release of such numbers helps bolster the morale of U.S. forces. But there is no way for outsiders to verify them.

Civilian casualties have proved even harder to pin down. Before the war, the United Nations predicted that they could reach 500,000; once it started, critics claimed thousands of civilian deaths. But in his May 1, 2003, "Mission Accomplished" speech, Bush said the use of precision weapons had largely diminished noncombatant deaths.

On Dec. 12, 2005, Bush offered his first and only number of Iraqi casualties: "30,000, more or less," without distinguishing between enemies and noncombatants. The independent, London-based Iraq Body Count offered a similar figure for civilians only -- 34,516 to 38,661 Iraqis dead by early 2006.

The group's most recent tally, drawn from global media accounts, estimated civilian deaths between 59,287 and 65,121, as of yesterday. The British medical journal Lancet estimated 100,000 civilian casualties in the 18 months after the invasion, and in October it raised its total to 600,000. On the low end, the independent, U.S.-based Iraq Coalition Casualty Count placed the one-year total from March 2006 to last weekend, including Iraqi security forces, at 21,186.

The United Nations, using reports from Iraqi morgues, hospitals and local authorities, placed the 2006 figure at 34,000 -- three times the official Iraqi government count. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office ordered the country's health ministry to stop providing figures to the United Nations.

The Defense Department does not release detailed tallies of Iraqi casualties, but in an Iraq security assessment published last week it said the number decreased in January "but remained troublingly high." Noting that only incidents "reported to or observed by Coalition forces" were included, it said that the U.N. estimate of more than 6,000 civilians killed or wounded in December was "about twice as many casualties as were recorded by Coalition forces."

Bush has vowed that "as Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." Yet the administration's calculations of the size and capability of Iraqi security forces have often been difficult to follow.

In March 2004, Rumsfeld announced "very good progress" in training Iraqi forces, whose numbers had increased "from zero to over 200,000." Nearly a year later, in February 2005, he gave the total as 136,065. At that point, Gen. Richard B. Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated that fewer than a third of them were capable of fighting.

According to Jeff Miller, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, official figures over the years "reveal a painfully clear pattern of overselling the pace and quality of Iraqi force training." One reason for the repeated discrepancies has been frequent changes in the way the Iraqis are counted.

The figures offered by Rumsfeld and Myers often bore little relation to tallies provided in weekly unclassified Pentagon reports. In late 2003, progress toward the Pentagon's goal of 221,700 trained police and military forces was divided into categories of Iraqis "currently operating" and those "currently in training." By June 2004, as the goal increased to 259,869, the two categories were melded, and "untrained" forces -- more than four-fifths of both the police and the army at the time -- were listed as "on duty" along with those trained.

In September 2004, the "on duty" category was renamed, and 231,560 Iraqis were described as "on hand."

After critics questioned the figures, "on hand" was subsumed into a new category -- "Iraqi Security Forces Trained/On Hand" -- and the total fell to fewer than 100,000. One reason was that the Pentagon stopped including nearly 80,000 members of Iraq's Facilities Protection Service, untrained guards under the control of various Iraqi government ministries.

More recently, as training for the now-135,000-member national police force has been largely turned over to Iraqis, U.S. officials have acknowledged that the force is partially infiltrated by Shiite militias. Meanwhile, the military is concentrating on the Iraqi army, described by Bush in his announcement of a new strategy on Jan. 10 as "essential to the U.S. security mission."

According to a chart in last week's Pentagon assessment, the number of "Trained Iraqi Security Forces" now totals 328,700. A disclaimer noted that "the actual number of those present-for-duty soldiers is about one-half to two-thirds of the total due to scheduled leave, absence without leave, and attrition."

Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.