Here's an exercise for the day. Compare Karen DeYoung's September 6th Post article on the Iraq numbers with today's by Michael Gordon in the Times.

We've already discussed DeYoung's article here. While Gordon discusses conflicting opinions about what the military's numbers mean, he really never questions the numbers themselves.

One mild exception comes in this graf ...

Critics of the White House have pointed to the Government Accountability Office report released on Tuesday, which asserted that it was unclear whether sectarian violence had decreased. The report cited data on daily, nationwide attacks that had been assembled by Gen. David H. Petraeus’s command. But American military officials note that the G.A.O. assessment did not take account of August, when the most significant gains in reducing violence materialized not only in Baghdad, but also across Iraq.

Gordon himself might have noted that the statistics compiled by the Associated Press showed, on the contrary, a marked increase in civilian deaths in August.

I'd recommend reading both articles and making your own comparison. I think it's hard to come to any other judgment but that Gordon's is a remarkably credulous account. And while it notes some points of disagreement it treats them in the manner one would expect of a relatively evenhanded advocate on behalf of the numbers coming out of the Baghdad command. I cannot see any rationale or excuse for why the problems raised in DeYoung's report find no place in Gordon's.

This is another example of how the Post, as big a train wreck as it's been on the editorial side, has consistently been the superior paper on intelligence, military and foreign reporting (at least in the Middle East) during the Bush presidency.