Much of this numbers game over Iraq truly approaches the level of parody. Civilian deaths are down. But that's because those numbers don't count car bombings. Why not? Because car-bombings are presumptively the work of 'al Qaeda' and that's different from sectarian violence.

Whittle this all down and an amazing amount of the 'surge' does appear to be an exercise in selective bean-counting and clever redefinitions. Kevin Drum's done some excellent numerical debamboozling on this. But I've yet to see one place where we can see all these numbers made sense of on a true apples to apples basis.