Iraqis' Quality of Life Marked By Slow Gains, Many Setbacks

Ali Hamrani, 37, an unemployed government worker, said he has no confidence in the local government, which he believes is completely corrupt.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

"You want me to tell you the truth? The officials at the municipal office are all crooks, and there is not an honest employee amongst them," he said. "The reality is that services are not much different than two years ago."

He said residents of his neighborhood in Sadr City, a densely populated Shiite district, are frustrated that they still receive only six to eight hours of electricity a day. But they were thrilled when the local government laid down pipes about six months ago that improved their water flow dramatically.

Unfortunately, the workers who dug up the road to install the pipes knocked out the telephone lines, which have remained out of service. Most frustrating to Hamrani is the lack of a sewage system, which has resulted in small lakes of feces-filled effluent in parts of Sadr City.

"Yes, we can say that there have been improvements in some areas of services," Hamrani said. "But not as much as we had hoped for or as much as we need."

Quantifying the Situation

Military officials struggling to quantify improvements in Iraqis' quality of life are wary after the intense scrutiny that security statistics have come under this year.

In an attempt to demonstrate transparency in the way the military compiles a wide range of data, more than 20 senior American officials conducted a two-day seminar for reporters this week at a military base just outside Baghdad.

The U.S. military has developed sophisticated reporting techniques and computer software systems to measure everything from Sunni deaths at the hands of Shiites, and vice versa, to the numbers of suicide and roadside bombs and trained Iraqi army officers. Details of an enemy attack in the field are reported and compiled in an enormous database -- containing information on hundreds of thousands of incidents -- less than two hours after they occur.

The military says it is constantly updating and clarifying its data. Aides informed Petraeus this week that closer analysis had shown that the number of mostly Sunni volunteers who have signed up to aid U.S. forces fighting the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq was 60,321 and not the 77,000 that senior military commanders and administration officials in Washington have used repeatedly.

Officers said the command is bracing for a new round of controversy when the Pentagon releases its next quarterly Iraq progress report to Congress in about 10 days. For the first time -- assuming the Pentagon accepts the recommendations of senior commanders here -- the report will include Iraqi government data on the number of attacks against civilians nationwide that the U.S. military believes are far less accurate than its own.

But Col. William E. Rapp, a senior Petraeus aide, said the truth is probably somewhere in between the U.S. and Iraqi figures. As American forces begin withdrawing from parts of Iraq, he said, the U.S. command will become ever more dependent on Iraqis to provide security information.

"It's a falsehood to say that if an American didn't see it, it didn't happen in Iraq," he said. "At some point in time, we're going to have to cut the string and just say, you know, okay, we just don't know much about what's going on" in major parts of Iraq, Rapp said. "We're just going to have to live with that."