Conditions in Iraq

I think this is a pretty useless graphic - it doesn't summarize the data in a way that makes it easier to understand, and instead just uses a kitschy clipbord and typewritery font to present a basic chart of raw data. The shading of the boxes, which aims to represent how "favorable" the data is, is difficult to understand and doesn't add any new information (just reading the numbers could tell you whether things are getting better or worse in Iraq). A better solution would probably have been to create linear historgrams of each category of data - this would show a trend much better than a simple table would, and would communicate whether conditions were getting better or worse without using a strange shading system.