Josh Marshall has hit upon a significant point while discussing the unusual methodology the military uses when describing the propaganda runup to the Petraeus Bu$h report on progress retrogression of civic stability in Iraq:

It's worth beginning by noting what appears to be the universal consensus that the strategic aim of the surge -- political reconciliation -- has been a complete flop. No progress and things have gotten much worse. That leaves a debate about tactical successes, which for better or worse, we're judging by various body counts. As I've struggled to get my head around this discussion I've looked -- mainly in vain -- for numbers going back some period of time with a consistent methodology since an apples to apples comparison over some period of time is the only way to make any sort of reliable judgments about change, improvement or decline.

What comes up again and again though is one basic disconnect -- the military command in Baghdad says civilian casualties have dropped dramatically. Independent press tabulations say the numbers are high and getting higher.

DeYoung's article gives us a couple bits of information that help us start to unravel the mystery. First, the military command in Baghdad is in a spat with the GAO, which the generals accuse of using a flawed methodology. (GAO's analysis basically disagreed with them on all particulars.) DeYoung's piece includes the very telling detail that the GAO is using the same methodology that the CIA and the DIA favor. So it would seem that it's not only a question of the government versus outside observers. The military command in Baghdad sounds like it's completely isolated even within the US government on how to compute the numbers.

It’s a noteworthy observation: the military, in order to serve its own unique interests, has elected to use a system of accounting that is completely at odds with not only the sort of statistical accounting used throughout the USG, but it’s also in direct opposition to what other, unbiased organs like icasualties.org, the Red Cross, Red Crescent and quite a few NGOs have to say on the subject.

As Marshall says, “That doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.“ A reader might be justified in saying that’s more than just an organizational desire to keep the gravy train rolling, because we’re really talking about deliberate and intentional fudging the facts.

We’ve seen unexplained changes in body counts, unannounced changes in definitions, incorrect accounting that’s “revised” several weeks after the initial figures are processed by the media. We’ve also seen that sometimes the incorrect figures are never corrected. They’re just left to sit there, a blatant contradiction with everyone else’s figures.

Why would the leadership of an organization so deliberately and extensively lie when they’re so easily caught out again and again? (We’ll use “the Army” as a symbol for the DoD, since the Army is the primary press contact agency in Baghdad, and that’s where the numbers come from. They’re compiling the body count figures there and then reporting them up the ladder.)

It may be too easy to just chalk it all up to political toadying. Lying is second nature to the Bu$h malAdministration. In fact, it’s their basic tool of governance. They’d sooner lie than tell the truth. They have to lie because their real agenda is just too monstrous even for overwork-distracted and TV-hypnotized Americans to stand for. Some people might assume the military is just going along with the program in order to keep the money flowing, as bizarre as that might sound. Remember, this generation of flag officers has no real strong experience leading (as opposed to commanding) troops in combat. Very few of our three and four stars have faced combat with their men. They were either staff weenies during Gulf War I, or “man managers” directing arrows and boxes on computer screens. They’ve been isolated from the butcher’s bill effects of their orders. True, several of them, such as GEN Petraeus did command during the original conquest of Iraq in 2003, but that was a relatively cheap campaign: 139 dead US soldiers from the beginning of the invasion to Mr Bu$h’s inept “Mission Accomplished” jockstrap stunt on the USS Lincoln.

It might not be ungenerous to say Iraq has been a campaign in self-aggrandizement for them.

The blatant misdirection in casualties is far more noticeable when discussing civilian casualties because neither the Bu$h people nor their military servants care very much about dead Iraqis. They’re just statistics to be massaged this way or that in order to achieve the desired political effect.

We also learn from DeYoung's article that as a basic matter of categorization, the Petraeus/White House numbers don't include the deaths of people killed by our friends (new Sunni allies in al Anbar). They don't include deaths of people killed by members of their own sect (Sunni-on-Sunni, Shia-on-Shia, etc.). They count or don't count based on things like where a person has been shot in the head.

One intelligence analyst told DeYoung, "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian. If it went through the front, it's criminal."

It's a little difficult to tell from the immediate context of the quote whether there's a little embellishment or whether that's literally true in every case about the methodology being used. But taken together what we can glean about the methodology -- which I take it is itself classified -- is that it is a classic case of presupposing the result in the methodology itself. DeYoung actually has a good quote in her piece from the Iraq Study Group that concisely explains the problem: "Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals."

Can an organization that so comfortably lies about today’s civilian victims of its defective policy decisions feel disquiet lying about tomorrow’s military deaths? And why would leaders – officers who took sworn oaths to defend and uphold the Constitution take actions in support of an obviously lawless administration, thereby violating their sworn oaths? Are they blind to the damage they are doing to the institution?

Jonathan Schwarz, while analyzing the obvious misfeasance of our Democratic leaders in Congress, suggests the military leaders are in fact blind to the best interests of the Army:

The Iron Law of Institutions is: the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution.

This is true for all human institutions, from elementary schools up to the United States of America. If history shows anything, it's that this cannot be changed. What can be done, sometimes, is to force the people running institutions to align their own interests with those of the institution itself and its members.

Read the rest of Mr Schwarz’s article to see how he applies this law to our useless Democratic Party “leaders” in Washington.

Let’s go back to the Army in Iraq for a moment. We have Generals Petraeus and Odierno, the two basic ground commanders, prosecuting a ground campaign against the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr, fearing him as the most meaningful “enemy” within Iraq, despite the repeated instructions from him to his band to stand down. Simultaneously, they’re taking every opportunity to pick a fight with Iran.

Granted they did catch a lucky break with the tribes of brigands in Anbar province who decided they wanted to oust the other brigands who had apparently clustered under the “al Qaeda in Iraq” franchise. It’s wise to measure any estimates in the size of al Qaeda in Iraq two or three times if the figures come from CENTCOM or MNF-I. We’ve caught them lying about Iraqi casualties. Would you expect them to be truthful about a-Q?

Andrew Tilghman estimates the franchisees in Anbar and Diyala are in the range of perhaps less than 1,000.

Malcolm Nance, the author of The Terrorists of Iraq and a twenty-year intelligence veteran and Arabic speaker who has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq…believes AQI includes about 850 full-time fighters, comprising 2 percent to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq," according to Nance, "is a microscopic terrorist organization."

Yet CENTCOM and MNF-I insist there are thousands and thousands of AQI members. Mr Tilghman quotes COL Pat Lang: When you have something that is really hot, the leaders start tasking everyone to look into that[.] Whoever is at the top of the pyramid says, 'Make me a briefing showing what al-Qaeda in Iraq is doing,' and then the decision maker says, 'Aha, I knew I was right.'"

In the 54 months since we invaded and conquered Iraq we’ve lost at least 3,783 US troops, and many thousands more wounded, blinded, and crippled. Some of these were killed and wounded by a-Q, but most were killed by the Iraqi resistance. Our best political justification from the politicians in Washington is “a-Q in Iraq,” which is laughably small. But if we withdraw, those 1,000 or less (mostly Saudi) fanatics will get into their troop transports and invade the US.

Or not.

But the gravy train must continue. There are promotions to win, and contacts to be made before a comfortable retirement into a second job in the defense industry.

As Schwarz said, “the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution.”