The “advancements” are primarily military in nature, the “reconstruction projects” are unnamed, and “some” polls show the installed leadership in a good light….. not a whole lot of information there.

The point of my post was that several of the phrases are carefully constructed spin. If a statement this heavily qualified were released by a critic of the occupation, it would be torn to pieces: I’m pointing out the smoke and mirrors. This feel-good piece is pure spin.

An “objective” is a specific, measurable, time-based articulation of a goal. If I tell you I have ten thousand men trained , that sounds great…unless my objective was to have fifty thousand men trained, because fifty thousand will be required to do the job.

Since the general’s statement doesn’t actually specify what the objectives were in any of those areas…they’re nice fluff, but they, in fact, represent serious failures rather than successes.

More obvious spin is the use of meaningless phrases like: “Some poll ratings for the government are as high as 70 percent approval rating.”
Heck, if I ran twenty polls, didn’t clarify what the questions had been, what constituted “approval”, how the sample was selected and analyzed, and looked at the best two results…I think I could say that “some polls” were “as high as” pretty much anything I wanted.

Your analysis of the Lancet brouhaha was excellent. May I suggest to you are applying the same high critical standard to the general’s statement?

In the spirit of Christmas, I shall refrain from pointing out

…that which you then go on to point out. I guess there’s not so much spirit in Christmas anymore, eh?

I think he did mention specific objectives which are being met. To wit:
1) Troops are being trained and numbers are on track to having 70 battalions (of approximate 550 men each).
2) Reconstruction is ramping up from 230 past the planning stages in June to more than 1,000 today.
3) Poll ratings are climbing.
4) Iraq is on track for democratic elections in January.

But, in the spirit of Christmas, I won’t point that out.

In the spirit of Christmas, I shall refrain from pointing out the number of times the General uses the weaselly qualifier “broadly on track”, which of course, in Spin Dialect means “not on track at all”. When you’re achieving your objectives, you say so. When you’re not, you introduce words like “broadly accepted”, “somewhat”, “largely”…you refer to “some polls” and a “generally favourable” public opinion. And of course, you avoid the bad news: the escalation in “significant incidents of violence”, the rapid decline in support for American troops in the country, and so on.

Calling this “good news”, I’m afraid, is like picking grains of rice out of a giant elephant turd.

And I’m delighted to hear that the insurgents aren’t ten feet tall…a point so pivotal that it is repeated twice. I hadn’t heard that they WERE ten feet tall, but it’s a real relief to be reassured that they aren’t. Pity in a way, because it would have made them easier to pick out. But still.

I enjoy picking out qualifiers in releases like these…those little words carefully inserted to cover the fact that you’re trying to give an impression which might be somewhat at variance with the facts. “Broadly” appears to be one of General Casey’s favourites (as in “broadly on track”, which means, of course, “we are not meeting our projections, but by selectively presenting information I can give you the impression that we are”). This particular release is bursting with qualifiers…”reconstruction is ‘building’ (har har, good pun, General, sir)…”some polls”…”generally”…and usually that’s a sign that the speechwriters are trying to pick good news out of a mess, rather in the way that egrets pick tiny grains out of elephant turds.