We don’t often take note of newspaper charts or graphics, but every now and then along comes one so informative and so well-presented that it’s closer to pure journalism than any of the words in the columns around it.
Today, that one was printed, on the op-ed page of the New York Times. It’s the work of Adriana Lins de Albuquerque and Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute and Amy Unikewicz, a graphic designer, and it constitutes an update on the state of Iraq, the nation.
The authors measure progress, or the lack of it, in Iraq over the past 18 months, employing 17 different categories, ranging from oil production/oil exports to length of gasoline lines to Iraqi civilian casualties.
Some highlights:
— Electricity production in Iraq is only 75 percent of what it was pre-war and has not improved appreciably in a year and a half.
— The estimated unemployment rate in the country is still a staggering 34 percent, but in fact that is a huge improvement from the 60 percent rate of July 2003.
— The amount of car traffic has soared five-fold from its prewar level. In fact, typical gasoline lines are now one mile long, a tenfold increase.
— The percent of Iraqis who favor near-term U.S. withdrawal has shot up from 30 percent a year and a half ago to 82 percent among Sunni Arabs and 69 percent among Shia.
— Fifty percent of Iraqis are optimistic about the future, down from 67 percent in July 2003.
— Officials estimate there are now 125,000 trained Iraqi police officers, soldiers and other security forces, whereas independent experts put the figure at 25,000.
— The estimated number of insurgents has more than tripled since July 2003 to 18,000 — but that’s actually a drop from the figure of 20,000 for last July.
This kind of thing is easy to absorb — precisely because it’s well-researched and then presented in a reader-friendly format that is hard to resist. Kudos to all involved.
–Steve Lovelady
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.