Dept of State - Iraq Weekly Status Report June 13 2007

Here's the link to the latest Dept of State Iraq Weekly Status Report (June 13, 2007). This report has some much fresher (more recent) charts on oil and electricity than the quarterly DoD report. This report successfully achieves an excellent grade from delivering its data in near real time fashion.

For those interested in keeping up with what's happening on the ground in Iraq, this weekly report is one of the essential pieces to pay attention to.

Slide Show Viewing of Today's Trends

We've covered quite a bit of ground today by reviewing several important documents that have included graphical representations of the trends at work in Iraq today.

We looked at:

1. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction's April 2007 Report to Congress
   
2. The Dept. of State's Iraq Weekly Status Report for May 30th, 2007
3. A Matthew Yglesias blog post on Electricity goals from Dept of State's December 2004 Iraq Weekly Status and compared it to the most recent data on the same electricity factor from the most recent report.
   
4. The most recent Iraq Index from Michael O'Hanlon at Brookings Institution
5. Additional troop strength charts created from Tabular data in the Iraq Index report

One of the things I have noticed about blogspot blogging is that while it is easy to upload graphics and embed them in a blog post, it is difficult/impossible to retain useful control over size or placement. The maximum blog spot size usually doesn't do justice to the trend charts that I wish to present. That means that to look at a whole series of slides in a single one of my posts, the reader has to click on each one, and then click to close the window and return to the post. This is time consuming and not particularly pleasant in my mind.

down the road, I will be exploring what other blog posting capabilities are available that will let me present the data laid out the way I want it. In the meantime, I have assembled all 26 jpg and gif charts into a single zip file that I posted here in my data download area.

Once you unzip to a directory of your choice, you can enjoy a full size slide show with your favorite slide viewer - for example, Microsoft Office Picture Manager or IRFANVIEW.

I'd like to hear back whether you think this represents a useful, time saving approach for you. I am interested in learning whether you find having all the trend graphs assembled in one place makes reading them and understanding them more rapid than when looking at the individual reports. And finally, I would enjoy discovering how much value you think is added by combining charts from a wide range of resources and pulling them together in one place.

Timelines in the News - Deja Vu

Here's a post on Electric Goalposts from Matthew Yglesias from December 8th, 2004 commenting on the electricity trends contained in the State Departments Weekly Iraq Status Report dated December 1st, 2004.

The money quote is:

But for goalposts purposes, let's note that we are not now at the goal, have never been at the goal, and are not even moving in the direction of the goal. Instead, Iraqis have less electricity (but way more phone lines, interestingly enough) than they had before the war.

Here's the chart from December 1, 2004 followed by the one from May 30th 2007. Not much seems to have changed in the intervening 30 months.


I found the commentary added into the first chart to be most helpful and useful as an aid to understanding what was really happening. A picture is worth a thousand words but even so, many time a few extra words can add even more value.


Both these charts rate high because they show a complete time range. Of course, it would sure be interesting to see what the Iraqi electricity chart looked like starting back in 1980 so that the effects of the first Gulf War when, if memory serves, severe damage was done to the Iraqi infrastructure. It would be useful to compare the recovery or non-recovery following that war to the current recovery. If anyone has that data, please let me know.

Iraq Weekly Status Report May 30, 2007

Here are some charts taken from the Department of State's May 30th, 2007 Iraq Weekly Status Report.

This first chart covers from January 2004. It appears as if demand is rising while production is falling and cannot seem to crack the 100,000 mark.

Also notice the sharp downward spikes for the light blue daily supply data. This tells me that it would be worthwhile to be able to zoom in on the supply factor and look at how supply is changing over time but using a much higher resolution than daily. An hourly trend chart for month's worth of data, or a daily chart using a 1 minute resolution would surely reveal some insights not currently available.

Similarly, when an aggregate trend factor show such sharp variation, it is frequently the case that creating additional trend charts that dis-aggregate the data can prove most helpful in understanding more fully what is happening.


This second chart makes it clear that the Iraqi currency has strengthened relative to the dollar over the past 12 months.


This third chart clearly shows the rising trend in Iraqi Commercial Bond interest rates over the past year.

This fourth chart suffers from showing far too brief a time period of only the most recent 10 weeks. Contrast this to the Oil Production chart in the previous post that showed the past 4 years and also provide useful trend data for production from the North and from the South.


This chart also has a much short sweep of time than needed for understanding the underlying trends. The related chart in the previous post showed refinery trends going back 4 years. This chart does have the positive feature that it groups all the bars for a given type of refined product together which is an improvement over the way the bars were used in the previous post from the Reconstruction report to Congress.


It's curious to note that there are no trend charts in this report from the State Department that show trends related to the first two "key areas identified as pillars of US government policy for victory in Iraq." Namely,

1. "Defeat the terrorists and neutralize the insurgents"
2. "Transition Iraq to security self reliance."
   

The trends in these areas are however dealt with in Michael O'Hanlon's weekly report from the Brookings Institution. We will be commenting on the May 30th version of that excellent report in our next post.

Oil Production: Iraq Weekly Status Report - March 21, 2007

Here's the latest Iraq Oil production chart from the Iraq Weekly Status Report, March 21, 2007
showing production at or close to the Oil Ministry Goal for 2007 and holding quite steady .for the past 7 weeks after a slowdown period at the beginning of January.

To completely understand the meaning of current production and this year's goal, it would be helpful if the full range of production data since the beginning of the war were also available in addition to the zoomed in most recent view that is presented.

With that in mind, I assembled a mini time series history (each about 3 months apart) of this chart as it appears in weekly reports stretching back to 2005. Note that the next to the last chart overlaps the charts before and after to more clearly show the January 2007 dip.

Ideally, all this data would be on a single chart and much more readily digestible.