Five more reasons for skepticism

1. Newsweek correspondent Babak Dehghanpisheh, who works in Baghdad: A Westerner going for a stroll in Baghdad without a convoy of Humvees or helicopter gunships is suicidal; your chances of getting killed or kidnapped in Baghdad is "one hundred percent."

2. Two former officers, one who served in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the other in Iraq, note the following about Gen. David Petraeus: He was handpicked by Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, before he resigned, as someone who strongly agrees with the administration's neoconservative philosophy and would therefore press forward President Bush's strategy; he is a part of President Bush's political operation.

3. The administration has set up a rapid-response PR unit headed by Ed Gillespie, the new presidential counselor replacing Karl Rove. Gillespie has organized twice-daily conference calls between the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the U.S. Embassy and military in Baghdad to set up the marketing plan to sell the progress and benefits of the surge.

4. According to a spokesman for the Baghdad headquarters of the Multi-National Force-Iraq, "Given a lack of capability to accurately track Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence, except in certain instances, we do not track this data to any significant degree." Attacks by U.S.-allied Sunni tribesmen also are excluded from the U.S. military's calculation of violence levels.

5. The intelligence community has its own problems with military calculations. Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the national intelligence estimate puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."

Tom Bartlett-Svehla

Mundelein