Desertion distortion.(Correction, Please!)

ITEM: The Associated Press reported on November 16: "Soldiers strained by six years at war are deserting their posts at the highest rate since 1980, with the number of Army deserters this year showing an 80 percent increase since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003."

ITEM: On November 16, Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News, in his introduction to an account about U.S. troops serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, commented: "The deployments have been long, up to 15 months at a time away from home, and then some. And tonight, there is hard evidence that that time away and the tempo of battle are indeed taking their toll. The number of desertions from the U.S. Army is way up in the six years we've been at war."

ITEM: Katie Couric of the CBS Evening News introduced a segment on November 16 about how deserters fleeing to Canada are "just part of a growing problem for the U.S. Army." David Martin continued: "Desertions from the Army are up dramatically--4,698 soldiers deserted in the last fiscal year, a sharp 42 percent increase from the year before. It doesn't take a wild guess to figure out why."

CORRECTION: By selecting misleading information, employing too small a sample, or omitting proper context, those with an ideological axe to grind often make up almost whatever story they desire, seemingly backed up by "scientific" data. Numbers are particularly effective in this regard, as has been famously noted by remarks attributed to Benjamin Disraeli and Mark Twain about the three kinds of lies--namely, "lies, damned lies, and statistics."

For their own purposes, major television networks and the nation's largest press service have exploited statistics about the 1,380,000-man U.S. military, including the 520,000 or so in the active-duty Army. There is no doubt that our military is feeling the strain of our continuing deployment in Iraq. But one need not agree with the current interventionist foreign policy to see through the manipulation of statistics and recognize that by and large our men and women in uniform are doing their duty despite the hardship.

Consider that just last year USA Today acknowledged that "the overall [military] desertion rate has plunged since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001." In an article that was not without its own shortcomings, USA Today on March 6, 2006 reported: "Desertion numbers have dropped since 9/11. The Army, Navy and Air Force reported 7,978 desertions in 2001, compared with 3,456 in 2005. The Marine Corps showed 1,603 Marines in desertion status in 2001. That had declined by 148 in 2005. The desertion rate was much higher during the Vietnam era. The Army saw a high of 33,094 deserters in 1971--3.4% of the Army force. But there was a draft and the active-duty force was 2.7 million. Desertions in 2005 represent 0.24% of the 1.4 million U.S. forces." As pointed out in the next-to-the-last paragraph of last year's USA Today account, there was "only one known case of desertion in Iraq."

The AP and networks more recently focused on the Army (not on the military overall) in order to present the worst possible case. Begrudgingly, the AP did admit well down in its article that the desertion numbers ...