The lead sentence of the NYT’s front-page story* crams in a dizzying amount of Iraq War criticism:

On the third anniversary of a war that they once expected to be over by now, President Bush and senior officials argued Sunday that their strategy was working despite escalating violence in Iraq, even as a former Iraqi prime minister once favored by the White House declared that a civil war had already started.

Although the sentence’s grammar is indecipherable, its intention couldn’t be clearer. Though the NYT talks of “escalating violence” and the U.S. military death toll of 2,313, it fails to mention that monthly casualties have been declining each month since November 2005, according to a USA Today article. Later, the NYT gets its facts wrong:

The war has taken more than 2,300 American lives, and those of 33,000 to 37,000 Iraqis, according to the estimates of the Iraq Body Count Project, an independent group that monitors the news media.

In fact, Iraq Body Count (IBC) doesn’t monitor the news media. The first item in IBC’s mission statement (What we do and why we are doing it):

1.0 Our project is rooted in the mainstream peace movement, which primarily opposes wars for being unnecessary.

This is the independent group the NYT is citing? While the NYT could issue a correction, how many people reading today’s front-page story won’t know the truth? Let’s talk about that unchecked abuse of power.

Stephen Spruiell and Alston B. Ramsay, an associate editor at NR, have both written extensively about IBC.

Spruiell:

[Iraq Body Count] alleges that coalition forces were responsible for 37 percent of those deaths, and that insurgents were responsible for only 9.5 percent. “Criminal violence” gets 36 percent of the blame, and 11 percent goes to “unknown agents” — a category into which suicide bombers are strangely lumped.

Ramsay:

The most disingenuous segment of IBC’s number padding is the addition of deaths from violence as reported by mortuaries. As of the two-year report in March [2005], this included 8,913 people, over one third of IBC’s total. The rationale: Increased lawlessness as a result of the war has led to increased violence and therefore civilian deaths directly attributable to the invasion.

Mortuaries aren’t always the most reliable source of body counts, as I noted when The Washington Post reported almost 1,000 more deaths than official reports, quoting a worker at a Baghdad morgue.

Though the NYT leads the pack, news headlines from other media outlets offer their Iraq War criticisms as well:

“Bush Marks Anniversary, Never Says ‘War’” — AP

If this is what the media are looking for, no wonder reports on Iraq can be so distorted.

And:

“Violence rages on anniversary of Iraq war: Three years after invasion, Iraqis voice anger at U.S.-led invasion” — AP

I’m guessing the AP didn’t read this: “But you know, the direction of the anger has changed. A year ago everyone was angry at the American. […] But that is not the message I am getting on the street now. People know these attacks are being carried out by the extremists.”

Finally:

“Quiet Disapproval in US Marks War’s Anniversary” — FT.com

That’s a creative way of saying no one showed up to the protests.

* UPDATE: The NYT story I originally linked here has changed dramatically. I updated the link to the original version of the article.