KEY POINTS:
Imprecise and sometimes fluctuating figures released by the US government on the Iraq war have made the impact of the four-year conflict hard to gauge, the Washington Post reported today.
In an article headed "Iraq War's Statistics Prove Fleeting" the paper damned the Bush administration's handling of statistics, saying the war had been "characterised from the start by confusion and misuse of key data".
The Post said some statistics - such as weekly tallies of oil production - had been "meticulous" but others had been elusive due to changing measures and categories.
Some "convenient guesses" had been offered as fact, while other numbers had varied depending on what they were being used to support, it said.
"Detainee numbers have oscillated, depending on whether the objective was to tout achievements or conceal secret prisoners," reporter Karen DeYoung wrote.
The Post quoted a US military spokesman last week telling reporters: "In February, Iraqi and coalition forces conducted just over 200 operations against al-Qaeda objectives, having killed over 100 terrorists and capturing over 400 terrorists."
But later in the briefing, the spokesman revised the figures saying 100 terrorists been killed but it had yet to be established how many of the 400 captured were actually terrorists " or whether they were perhaps just innocent bystanders".
The Post said the Pentagon was precise when calculating US military deaths, but that civilian and enemy combatant deaths were especially hard to pin down.
When the US death toll topped 1000 at the end of 2004, the US military said in August 2004 alone, the US-lead coalition had probably killed 1500 to 2500 terrorists and criminals.
In 2005, the top military officer in Iraq estimated 15,000 enemy fighters had been captured in 2004. About a year earlier, US Central Command had estimated the number of insurgents in Iraq was just a third of that.
The Pentagon had said it used the number of enemy losses to help "help convey magnitude and context" after a battle, but the Post complained there was no way of verifying the figures.
For example, in December 2005, President Bush put the number of total Iraqi casualties - civilian and combatant - at around 30,000 but the London-based Iraq Body Count gave around the same figure for civilian deaths only, the paper said.
More recently, the Pentagon said the UN estimate of more than 6,000 civilians killed last December was "about twice as many casualties as were recorded by Coalition forces."
Shifting figures made it hard to calculate the progress Iraqi forces were making towards taking over from US troops, the Post said.
It said in March 2004, then defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld had estimated Iraqi forces at over 200,000, the next February he put the figure at 136,065 and then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said less than a third were capable of fighting.
Pentagon reports were even harder to follow. In 2003 they divided Iraqi police and military into those "currently operating" and those "currently in training. However, by June 2004, the Post said, the two categories merged and "untrained" forces were listed as "on duty". In September that year, "on duty" was renamed "on hand".
"On hand" later became "Iraqi Security Forces Trained/On Hand", Iraq's Facilities Protection Service members were no longer counted and the total fell below 100,000.
The Post said last week the figure was put at 328,700, but a disclaimer stated: "the actual number of those present-for-duty soldiers is about one-half to two-thirds of the total due to scheduled leave, absence without leave, and attrition."
