Check this out, Tom:

U.S. tally of Baghdad deaths omits car bombs, mortars

By Mark Brunswick and Zaineb Obeid

McClatchy Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. officials, seeking a way to measure the results of a program aimed at decreasing violence in Baghdad, aren't counting scores of dead killed in car bombings and mortar attacks as victims of the country's sectarian violence.

In a distinction previously undisclosed, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said Friday that the United States is including in its tabulations of sectarian violence only deaths of individuals killed in drive-by shootings or by torture and execution.

That has allowed U.S. officials to boast that the number of deaths from sectarian violence in Baghdad declined by more than 52 percent in August over July.

But it eliminates from tabulation huge numbers of people whose deaths are certainly part of the ongoing conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Not included, for example, are scores of people who died in a highly coordinated bombing that leveled an entire apartment building in eastern Baghdad, a stronghold of rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

You always come up with some means to delude yourself that things are just fine and dandy in Iraq. It was this same self-delusion that convinced you there were WMDs in Iraq in the debate leading to the war. It is this same delusion that convinces you that force feeding "democracy" in Iraq is going to bring about peace and stability in the Middle East.