Progress in Iraq
The Iraqis are learning from the Bush Administration how best to keep people from focusing on the unpleasant consequences of their actions, stop releasing the reports that show them.
The Iraqi government withheld recent casualty figures from the United Nations, fearing they would be used to present a grim picture of Iraq that would undermine the coalition's security efforts, UN officials said Wednesday.
Working with its own figures, the UN released a new human rights report saying that sectarian violence continued to claim the lives of a large number of Iraqi civilians in both Sunni and Shia neighbourhoods of Iraq's capital, despite the coalition's new Baghdad security plan.
. . .
The Iraqi government announced in a statement its deep reservations about the report that it says is "inaccurate in presenting information" and "lacks credibility in many of its points. Also, it lacks balance in presenting the situation of the human rights situation in Iraq."
"The publication of this unbalanced report … puts the credibility of the UN office in Iraq on stake and it aggravates the humanitarian crisis in Iraq instead of solving it," the statement said.
And there’s no better way to show how lacking in credibility your detractors are than to refuse to show the figures that could prove things one way or the other.
