Sen. Biden proclaimed himself uninterested in the methodological dispute between Petraeus’ command and the GAO. But when Petraeus reaffirmed that the last five weeks of positive data collection on civilian casualties would have changed the GAO’s skeptical assessment of the surge, Biden arched an eyebrow. “Five weeks is a moment,” Biden said.
Petraeus, for his part, said that “their data is our data.” Maybe so, but their analysis is very different from Petraeus’, and that just makes the question about methodological quality all the more pressing.
