Innumeracy in Iraq

Knight-Ridder brings us these curious numbers this morning. The U.S. military says 40,000 people have "begun coming back" to Fallujah; the Iraqi interim government puts the number at 60,000. Neither statistic accounts for those who have come back and then left again, which, based on all available evidence, must be a very high percentage. But, even taking the Iraqi government's number at face value, and assuming all 60,000 had remained, here's the preposterous part: the Iraqi government "said it expected the rest to return by Jan. 14." With a minimum of 200,000 residents of the city, that's 140,000 more people to return in six days. But here's how each one has to return:

"Outside the town, hundreds of Al-Fallujah citizens stood in a long passage created by strings of barbed wire. At the end of the line, a U.S. soldier sat at a table with an interpreter and asked people for name and marital status, then took all 10 fingerprints. People also were told to look into a box, which scanned their retinas."

140,000 people to be processed in that way in six days would mean 23,000 people a day, or, figuring an 8-hour day (not much sunlight this time of year), about 3,000 people an hour getting quizzed (through an interpreter), fingerprinted (all ten fingers!) and retina scanned! Oh yeah, that'll happen. All they need is about 100 checkpoints, each with their own retina-scanning machine.

In the same article, the author tells us that "hundreds if not thousands of homes were in a shambles after months of airstrikes." But the one person he picks to follow from the checkpoint to his home "walked from one road to the next, looking in awe at mounds of rubble where buildings used to stand," and then finds his own home totally destroyed, a story which echoes every single story of a Fallujah returnee which has appeared anywhere. There are "hundreds if not thousands" of homes in Fallujah destroyed just like there were "hundreds if not thousands" of demonstrators (according to papers like the New York Times) at some of the pre-invasion antiwar demonstrations. "Tens of thousands" is almost certainly a more accurate figure; hundreds is simply preposterous based on all available evidence.