last april, the bush administration released a "patterns of global terrorism" report. the report stated that the number of terrorist attacks world-wide dropped significantly in 2003 and reached its lowest level in 35 years.
the bush administration, of course, pointed to the report as evidence that it was winning the war on terror, and specifically to rebut the claim by war opponents that invading iraq had increased not decreased the threat of terrorism.
but right away, people who read the report thought the numbers didn't look right. bloggers also pointed out a few of the methodological problems with the report (e.g. here and here)
so now it turns out the critics were right. the state department has acknowledged that its methodology in the original report was flawed. 2003 was marked by a sharp increase, not decrease, in acts of terrorism. indeed, the revised report is expected to show that the number of acts of terrorism in 2003 was "perhaps to its highest level in 20 years."
so here's my question: since the bush administration used the original report showing a drop in acts of terrorism to claim that it was winning the war on terror, after the numbers are revised to show a sharp increase in attacks, logically shouldn't they concede they are losing?
(some of the above links via cursor and the bitter shack)
an aside: i actually suspect that the revised report will still have methodological problems. the main one is that there is no good truly neutral and objective definition of terrorism and that ambiguity allows the u.s. to exclude actions that it doesn't want to count. for example, some u.s. soldiers have reported that they intentionally killed civilians in iraq. if iraqi insurgents did the same thing, it would count as terrorism. but implicit in the u.s.' definition of terrorism is that violence caused by the u.s. is not terror. while such actions get little coverage in the u.s., foreign sources sometimes report them. thus the state department report, even when revised, will probably still be seen as undercounting worldwide terrorism by people outside the u.s.
