The violence in Iraq is down, if you don't count ALL of the violence in Iraq.

The U.S. military's claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.

The intelligence community has its own problems with military calculations. Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."

"Depending on which numbers you pick," he said, "you get a different outcome." Analysts found "trend lines . . . going in different directions" compared with previous years, when numbers in different categories varied widely but trended in the same direction. "It began to look like spaghetti."

Among the most worrisome trends cited by the NIE was escalating warfare between rival Shiite militias in southern Iraq that has consumed the port city of Basra and resulted last month in the assassination of two southern provincial governors. According to a spokesman for the Baghdad headquarters of the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), those attacks are not included in the military's statistics. "Given a lack of capability to accurately track Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence, except in certain instances," the spokesman said, "we do not track this data to any significant degree."

I keep seeing the right wing ask if those of us on the left are going to jump to conclusions before we see the report from General Petraeus. The answer is yes, we are.

But "jump to conclusions" would be the wrong term. We are looking at all of the evidence that is coming out of Iraq through various outlets and making an assessment. The idea that ANYBODY would simply trust a report by one source, especially a source so carefully controlled by the White House, seems to be completely naive at this point.

The majority of us who have watched as this report is framed, and re-framed, in an effort to find benchmarks which seem achieveable, are pretty convinced that the least credible source of information about how things are going in Iraq will come from this report by Petraeus.