If a bomb explodes and only kills Iraqi, does it really exist? This thorny variant on the Buddhist thought experiment about trees in the forest has become a showpiece of the latest Bu$h malAdministration’s propaganda offensive that things are really, really, really getting better in Iraq.

WASHINGTON - U.S. officials who say there has been a dramatic drop in sectarian violence in Iraq since President Bush began sending more American troops into Baghdad aren't counting one of the main killers of Iraqi civilians.

Car bombs and other explosive devices have killed thousands of Iraqis in the past three years, but the administration doesn't include them in the casualty counts it has been citing as evidence that the surge of additional U.S. forces is beginning to defuse tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

So, if a tree falls in a forest, and no one heard it, does it really make a noise? Not if you’re George Bu$h, alleged warlord, war president and resident-in-chief of BizarroWorld.

One might call this the Mesopotamian variant on “IOKIYAR.”

BizarroWorld has other oddities, too:

President Bush explained why [bombings don’t count] in a television interview on Tuesday. "If the standard of success is no car bombings or suicide bombings, we have just handed those who commit suicide bombings a huge victory," he told TV interviewer Charlie Rose.

Others, however, say that not counting bombing victims skews the evidence of how well the Baghdad security plan is protecting the civilian population - one of the surge's main goals.

"Since the administration keeps saying that failure is not an option, they are redefining success in a way that suits them," said James Denselow, an Iraq specialist at London-based Chatham House, a foreign policy think tank.

It would probably useless to try to impress on an eight-year-old mind that the world is not black and white, and the reality slice of the day doesn’t just include bomb attacks or no bomb attacks. A reduction in the number of car, truck, and vest suicide bombings might indicate some kind of progress.

By ignoring the bomb count the Bu$h fantasists in the White House and CENTCOM are taking a giant step forward in mendacity and cloudy logic. Since they aren’t counting bomb deaths anymore, and the number of tortured bodies discovered each morning has gone down, the surge is working.

In fact the daily deaths from all causes hasn’t gone down.

According to the statistics, which McClatchy reporters in Baghdad compile daily from Iraqi police reports, 1,030 bodies were found in December. In January, that number declined 32 percent, to 699. It declined to 596 February and again to 473 in March.

Deaths from car bombings and improvised explosive devices, however, increased from 361 in December to a peak of 520 in February before dropping to 323 in March.

McClatchy was careful to note that the daily executions had tapered off before the surge escalation began in February, due to the Sadr Mahdi Army being ordered to step down in anticipation of Mr Bu$h’s Last Gasp offensive.

Ryan Crocker who was appointed as Ambassador to Iraq this month, cited the bombings as a reaction to the escalation, saying, "The terrorists like al-Qaida would make their own surge." Several US officials have been quoted as saying they don’t expect the escalation to stop the bombings.

If you don’t expect the escalation to stop the bombings then why claim it’s working just because you stop counting them?