The White House denied on Wednesday that Iraq was moving toward chaos as demonstrated in a classified military chart published by The New York Times the same day.

"If you got the same report last week, you would have found out the national sectarian incidents from the 21st to the 27th (of October) dropped 23 percent; casualties nationwide dropped 23 percent; incidents of sectarian violence in Baghdad dropped 23 percent; sectarian killings in Baghdad dropped 41 percent," White House spokesman Tony Snow told a news briefing.

The Times reported Wednesday that a one-page slide, prepared by the Central Command for a Oct. 18 briefing, showed Iraq was edging toward chaos.

The slide, which included a color-coded bar chart used to illustrate an "Index of Civil Conflict," showed a sharp escalation in sectarian violence since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, and tracked a further worsening in October despite a concerted American push to tamp down the violence in Baghdad.

Snow said the military conducted briefings on Iraq regularly that the slide, published by the Times, "was a snapshot taken at the height of the Ramadan violence."

"You had a snapshot at a single point; when it was violent," he said.

The Times report said that in fashioning the indexes, the military was weighing factors like the ineffectual Iraqi police and the dwindling influence of moderate religious and political figures, rather than more traditional military measures such as the enemy's fighting strength and the control of territory.

The conclusions the Central Command had drawn were not encouraging, the report said. The slide showed Iraq as moving sharply away from "peace," an ideal on the far left side of the chart, to a point much closer to the right side of the spectrum, a red zone marked "chaos."

Source: Xinhua