Murdoc Online ran into an interesting study at Politburo Diktat in how to graphically depict the deaths of American/Coaliton soldiers in Iraq by month.
[See the graphs at the linked site, as Murdoc has pointed out they were not loading here.]
[Knit-picking note: The graphs are measuring two different things - US and Coalition deaths. There are also military and non-military numbers. See the link below for the actual numbers by category.]
Mark Twain attributed this quote to Disraeli: "There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Or, to modernize that: "To lie is human, and only takes a political mind. To severely misrepresent the truth one needs a PC and Excel."
Even one death doesn't look good (and the 651 Coalition total to date is a huge and growing price to pay) but, as the two graphs demonstrate, there are ways to make things look like they are worsening when, in fact, they are probably at least stable, and possibly improving. (We need a couple more months of data to establish a curent trend.)
For the exact numbers, please see this lunaville.org page [anti-war, but apparently accurate -- and the link is now corrected, thanks to Murdoc's comment], which is linked in the left sidebar. According to it, US casualties by month from May through Feb were:
37-30-47-35-31-42-82-40-47-20
The November spike involved a couple of helicopters being shot down, as you'll recall. February deaths were encouragingly lower, but we'll need to see a couple more months to see if there is really a downward trend.
In the 308 days since GWB's May 2 carrier landing, Coalition military deaths have averaged 1.56/day. Over the past 3 months (Dec-Jan-Feb), the deaths/day were:
1.55 - 1.68 - 0.79
I can't interpret a trend from those three numbers. Let's see another month or two, and see if the bad guys continue the trend toward killing mostly Iraqis.
Unfortunately, the deaths of Iraqis seems to be trending upward (with a very large number of deaths in the past few days -- which are really 9/11-like in terms of % of the Iraqi population, which is about 1/10 that of the US), as the insurgents target the newly-trained Iraqi police and religious groups, in an apparent effort to foment a civil war between factions and disrupt efforts to turn over the country to its people, so US forces can be withdrawn to support positions. The bad guys really are pulling out all the stops in a desperate effort to make our efforts to establish a free, democratic Iraq right in the middle of their world.
I'd like to believe, as some pundits do, that the insurgents will be weeded out by the Iraqi people themselves once the Coalition forces are withdrawn to as-needed-only status and the people see the insurgents are not brave warriors killing "occupiers" but just thugs killing their fellow citizens. We'll see.
What appears to be a worsening condition is actually just the dying thrusts of the losers.
As a good example of how a negative spin can be put on these same developments, see this glass-half-empty Back to Iraq post, which has to be exactly the reaction the bad guys desire. These tactics worked before; in Vietnam, in Lebanon, and in Somalia; but they are not going to work as long as George W. Bush is in office.
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Quibbling anal-retentive footnote: An accidental death or suicide is still a tragic death, but to be objective in considering the human cost of the war, we need to realize that the military experiences a certain percent of such deaths per capita wherever the troops are located (stateside in training or in theater), just as there is a fairly predictable number of civilian deaths per month in any city with a population of 130K.
I'm not all that comfortable treating human deaths as mere statistics, but it is the best way to discern which direction we're headed over time.
In exploring (out of curiosity) the background for the Twain quote above, I ran across this quote by a statistician which I think I'll adopt as the methodology for this ACE site, as I report and let the commenters decide:
These are the figures I have done my best to simplify and set intelligibly before you. I now leave the way clear for the wriggling.
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