Few Parts of Iraq Are Stable

The New York Times (my link is by way of the Seattle Times) has published an internal embassy staff document which assesses each province in Iraq. The key image of the document is this:



which paints a bleak picture. Only three provinces are described as stable, with several described as serious.

I imagine many anti-war bloggers will pick on this as proof that Iraq is a failure. Well, to be fair, I think this analysis is somewhat misleading. How are the four status values defined? According to the article,

1. Critical means "a government that is not functioning" or "represented by a single strong leader; an economy that does not have the infrastructure or government leadership to develop and is a significant contributor to instability; and a security situation marked by high levels of AIF [anti-Iraq forces] activity, assassinations and extremism.",
2. Serious means "a government that is not fully formed or cannot serve the needs of its residents; economic development that is stagnant with high unemployment; and a security situation marked by routine violence, assassinations, and extremism.",
3. Moderate and stable are not defined.

Note that this single status represents three independent pieces of information at the same time: development status of local government, economic development, and the security situation.

The Times wants to interpret these statuses as reflecting the security situation, but the definitions they provide show that this is not an appropriate interpretation. Frankly, there is no obvious interpretation. It is a poor approach to define a single quantity to measure multiple things at the same time. How is each province's score determined? If the economic situation is not all that good, but the security situation is very good, what's the score? One province with a well-developed local government but poor security would probably get the same score as a very peaceful province with a poorly developed local government, though we would hardly view the overall situation in the two as similar.

The Times notes the anomaly of Basra, which is listed as "serious" but which the Times also describes as "relative[ly] calm." The Times does not explain why Basra is listed as "serious", being content to simply describe the situation there as such. This is a prime example of how this ambiguous analysis can be quite misleading.

A better approach would be to analyze each province along the three metrics independently. In other words, show the provinces according to only security in one map, according to economics in another, and according to governmental maturity in yet another. With that, the reader could truly compare apples to apples.