If you’re in need of proof that proponents of The Surge, the president’s latest plan for accomplishing more dead people in Iraq, are deeply ill at ease with reality, consult Martin Sieff, UPI’s senior political analyst. On April 30, Sieff wrote a story in which he uses an extraordinarily creative statistical analysis to demonstrate that The Surge is Da Bomb.

In all, 33 U.S. soldiers were killed in the 12-day period from April 19 through Monday at an average rate of 2.75 per day. This marked a significant improvement on the previous 28-day period from March 22 to April 18 when 87 U.S. soldiers were killed at an average rate of just over 3.1 per day. It was also considerably better than the previous 22 day period from Feb. 28 to March 21, when 67 U.S. soldiers were killed at an average rate of just over three per day.

The rate at which U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq has therefore improved on levels that were previously remarkably stable since the beginning of this year.

We have 12-day periods, 28-day periods, 22-day periods and, elsewhere in the story, 9-, 14-, 16-, 18-, 19- and 29-day periods, all being compared to one another. But in the same scientific vein, the 18-day period between April 20 and May 7 has seen 59 US soldiers killed at a rate of nearly 3.3 per day, which is considerably worse than the 28-day and 22-day periods cited by Sieff above, and the seven-day period from May 1 – May 7, inclusive, has seen 26 US troops killed at an average of 3.7 per day.

What Sieff has done, of course, is employ the time-honored analytical technique of throwing out all the numbers that conflict with his thesis. In fact, his 2.75 dead US troops per day in those last 12 days of April is higher than the average in January and March and only slightly lower than the February average. And for the entire month of April, the average was 3.46 per day, making it far and away the worst month of the year and among the worst months of the entire occupation. So Sieff is right: until April, the casualty rates had been pretty stable this year. Now, they’ve gotten dramatically worse, unless you take the one-day period in May when the Pentagon didn’t announce any casualties, in which case the trend is spectacularly good.

I’m not a statistician; maybe there’s some rationale for comparing wildly different chunks of time with one another. But the notion that any particular 12-day period selected from a within a 1500-day range will provide you with any significant information about trends is dishonest or demented or, more likely, dementia-driven dishonesty.

You really have to read the whole thing, but here’s another little taste for the faint of heart.

The latest figures are also markedly better than the fatality rate of 3.4 killed per day during the 29-day period from Dec. 7 to Jan. 4, when 99 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq. But the latest figures are still poorer than the 16-day period from Nov. 21 to Dec. 6, when 35 U.S. soldiers were killed at an average rate of just over 2.2 per day.

The latest figures remain above those for the 14-day period from Nov. 7 to Nov. 20, when 32 U.S. soldiers were killed at an average rate of just below 2.3 per day. But they are much better than the 22-day period from Oct. 16 to Nov. 6, when 371 U.S. soldiers were killed at an average rate of just below 3.23 per day.

During the 18-day period from Sept. 28 to Oct. 15, 56 U.S. soldiers were killed at an average rate of just over 3.1 per day. That rate was identical to the one we reported Oct. 1 in these columns for the nine days from Sept. 19 to Sept. 27, when 28 U.S. soldiers were killed at an average rate of 3.1 per day. At that time, we noted that these figures were far higher than the rate during the previous 18-day period, when 33 U.S. soldiers were killed from Sept. 1 to Sept. 18, at an average rate of 1.77 per day. Those Sept. 19-Oct. 15 figures were almost identical to the average rate per day of the past 50 days.

Seriously: what?

Sieff could have spared himself a serious headache had he only waited a few weeks until General Rick Lynch announced that casualties would be climbing in coming months, at which point all those statistics could have been employed to prove that the increase in casualties means The Surge is working.

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