Death Rates Again

The authors cleverly note that:

“The comparison is imperfect, of course, because a much higher fraction of the American population is elderly and subject to higher death rates from degenerative diseases. The death rate for U.S. men ages 18 to 39 in 2003 was 1.53 per 1,000 — 39 percent of that of troops in Iraq. But one can also find something equivalent to combat conditions on home soil. The death rate for African American men ages 20 to 34 in Philadelphia was 4.37 per 1,000 in 2002, 11 percent higher than among troops in Iraq. Slightly more than half the Philadelphia deaths were homicides.”

But lets think now (hard as that may seem). If we were not at war (unjustifiabaly in my view) the specific deaths the authors are minimizing would be 100% avoidable. But set that aside. Are we supposed to find it comforting that young African American men die at astronomical rates in our major cities? Or should we be realy, really pissed thata we ae wasting money on a war instead of cleaning up our domestice war zones? This is pathetic.

Inevitably, people like Glenn Reynolds see numbers like this and—instead of thinking “Christ, inner city homicide rates are even remotely comparable to military deaths in Iraq!”—think, hey, “it’s hard to look at these numbers and see the catastrophe” that the mainstream media report on.

For which the test is a choice of two holiday destinations for Labor Day, and no alternative: the black neighbourhoods of Philly or downtown Baghdad. Let’s see which Prof Ernest T. Bass picks.

Oh, fuck Insty: even after showing the micro-cojones to quote the Philly native in Iraq he decides that one of his instapals — the eminently fuckwitted Dean Esmay — deserves the last word. What a complete tool.

And clearly a hospital operating theatre is the worst possible place to be if you have, say, a gaping chest wound. The deaths-per-thousand-person-years in those places are just crazy

The Washington Post of yesterday is gone, replaced by an irresponsible rag. How sad. I’d expect this sort of thing from the conspicuously dishonest right-wing press, like the death count gimmick recently perpetrated by WorldNetDaily. Did you know that U.S. troop deaths in Iraq have been dropping in number for several consecutive months? The writer, Melanie Morgan of KSFO, included the count for August, even though the month had several days to go, just to make her claim work. The day after she published her column, her claim was already untrue. Liars and truth-twisters.

Thomas, Kieran specifically deals with your point in his post. You could have avoided making a fool out of yourself if you had only, say, done a Ctrl-F on “Vietnam”.

And given that we regularly compare inner city gang violence to that found in war zones, exactly what is wrong with using it for comparison?

The word you’re looking for is “Nothing”. And really, given that the authors are trying to make a point, you should be criticizing their point more than their rhetorical device.

bi: But young blacks in inner-city Philly are all soldiers in drug gangs, didn’t you know?

What’s the point of this post? I got about halfway through and had to stop because it was so vacuous.

“Demographics of soldiers aren’t the same of the entire US. Combat life is different than normal life. These numbers aren’t directly comparable…” Don’t they mention that in the articles? Why is knowing other deathrates than combat deathrate so innappropriate? They’re not doing a technical analysis, just providing perspective.

Your post is much more offensive than their virtual offense. Kieren, you are much better than this crap you just wrote. What they did is such a non-offense, it’s embarrassing that you had such a strong reaction to it.

Aaron, the article by the original authors is an exercise in dishonest excuse making for a bloody war. It is also one of a long series of such articles. This war is already functionally invisible in the US by policy: we don’t see images of violence in Iraq. Our contemptable president, unlike all previous wartime presidents, can’t even be bothered to attend funerals here in the US. Even the coffins coming home are barred from having pictures taken. And for the latest Orwellian touch, we get treated to articles claiming that being a soldier in Iraq is no worse than living in (pick your favorite domestic setting). It’s despicable. War supporters shouldn’t be able to pretend that their fantasies are a video game.

JohnQ, I don’t see how the outcome in Vietnam is at all relevant to whether the comparison made is appropriate. What am I missing? This seems to be a different point from the one Kieran makes, so perhaps you can share what you have in mind.

JP, read the article and you’ll see that there’s good reason to think Kieran didn’t bother to read the entire article before spouting off (while I did suffer through his entire post). After all, the authors of the WaPost piece say “Part of the reduction in the death rate is attributable to improvements in military medicine and such things as the use of body armor. These have reduced the ratio of deaths to wounds from 24 percent in Vietnam to 13 percent in Iraq.” To make the same point, Kieran doesn’t quote this article based on current and cumulative information but instead reaches back to another WashPo article, from two years ago. (That article, interestingly enough, also makes comparisons between risks of serving in various wars (Iraq vs. Vietnam and Iraq vs. WWII), but Kieran doesn’t note that the calculation of the riskiness of Iraq has changed in the nearly two years since the article he likes was published. He also doesn’t note that the information he uses is outdated, based on the article he’s criticizing. Is he calling the authors of the current piece liars? Is there some other reason we should reject the current date offered in the article for the numbers from an article two years ago? I mean, other than political convenience or protecting people like marc from a confrontation with evidence?)

Thomas: surely you didn’t “suffer through” this bit?

“…all of what I’ve said so far ignores the elephant in the room, which is that the death rates in the article refer exclusively to U.S. forces on active duty in the whole of Iraq and not to regular Iraqi civilians.”

So, Preston and Buzzell make a bogus comparison between military death rates in Iraq and civilian death rates in the US, but when they rope in a comparison between Vietnam and Iraq, the previous bogus comparison becomes un-bogus?

And if you want others to be charitable to your points, then you should be charitable to others’ points, instead of mud-slinging phrases like “ideologically motivated” or “political convenience”.

I can think of lots of reasons why Vietnam war death rates for US soldiers would have been higher than those in Iraq. Most obviously, improved medical support. Also, increased emphasis on “force protection” (was that term even around in 1970?).

And the NVA fielded divisions with field artillery and so forth – a step above platoon sized units using mortars and IEDs.

One wonders if perfesser Reynolds ever stops to think about the implications of a comparison of death rates of Americans from terrorism versus other risks in terms of the amount of time and money devoted to the GWOT relative to other government activities.

Kieran, I’m afraid I don’t see your rationale. Your objection is that the authors piece ignores context, and you offer the death/wounded ratio as an example. But it’s an example that the authors address in their piece, so, again, I don’t see why you felt you had to reach outside their piece to address it. As for whether the comparisons to civilian life are inappropriate, you’ve made your point. I don’t see what’s inappropriate about the comparison at all, provided sufficient caveats and alternative comparisons are given (as I believe they are in this case).

Finally, as to what a reader should take away from this article, I don’t think a reasonable reader would take away from the article what you say they’d take. I also don’t think Glenn Reynold’s reacted as you say he did. The piece, as you note in the original post, doesn’t address ordinary Iraqis (that’s the elephant in the room), so I don’t think a reasonable reader would think it offers conclusions on how life in Iraq generally is.

And the article doesn’t in fact include all of those caveats, because it doesn’t distinguish between troops on patrol and troops servicing the motor pool.

So the article advances a startling comparison, and you’re defending it because it also includes all of the caveats that demonstrate the comparison is worthless?

That’s a lovely trick, isn’t it? Imagine all the bizarre propositions you could “defend” that way, while counting on the inattentiveness of both average and partisan-hack readers to get the “conclusion” but not the caveats noticed.

The obvious question posed by the stats of American military deaths is whether there is connection between the comparative lack of American military fatalities and the way the Iraq war has been lost by the Americans. I’d argue there is.

The American way of fighting is to protect, with the massive advantages given by American technology, the American fighting man. This is a good strategy to win a conventional battle. But it is a bad strategy to win a guerilla war. Since the goal of the war was to occupy Iraq until the nation had reformed as an American ally, the tactics of the war had to be brought into line with that strategy. And that would mean minimizing collateral Iraqi casualties – that is, individuating Iraqi insurgents and killing or capturing them out of the general civilian population. But individuating those insurgents would significantly raise the level of hazard for American soldiers. The American military has opted, generally, not to do that – instead adopting a strategy like that revealed by the investigation of the Haditha murders. The American infliction of casualties on Iraqis is broadly permitted in order to protect every American soldier from harm; a policy that leads to re-inforcing the insurgency as more and more Iraqis have an incentive, given this policy, to join them or at least tacitly give them support. Add to this that the infliction of iraqi casualties by the Americans has no effect on the infliction of iraqi casualties by the insurgents, and you get a picture of why Americans have lost the war. It is like the police coming into a high crime neighborhood and killing random people in the neighborhood without ever lowering the crime rate.

I think Americans have essentially been irrelevant in Iraq – a sort of mercenary ethnic cleansing unit – since Najaf in 2004. It is interesting to see how they got to that point so quickly. The stats give us a paradox that is at the center of Amrican foreign policy: the Americans are at once the most aggressive nation in the world and the one with the lowest tolerance for American deaths. Hence, they are more apt to get into wars (severely underestimating the costs) that they then mismanage (trying to remain below a threshhold of casualties that divides their tactical means from their strategic ends). This goes a long way back in American history — Grant and McClellan still fight for the soul of the military, with the compromise being a McClellan like delicacy about American deaths combined with a Grant like ferocity in inflicting massive deaths on the enemy — and identifying the latter as victory. Of course, that isn’t victory at all.

I don’t see what’s wrong with the comparison of active duty soldiers and inner-city black males. Doesn’t this show that, in terms of life expectancy, you are better off being a soldier on active duty than a young urban black man? And isn’t that true? Of course, the odds are even worse if you are actually out on patrol, or if you are a street level drug dealer, but that doesn’t invalidate the more elementary–but less subjective–comparison.

Stepping back a little, this statistic gives us an accurate big picture. No one wants to fly to Baghdad, and, you know what?–no one, including lib/lab college professors, wants to go walking around downtown Detroit at night. Put another way, if you were a parent, and your son came home and told you that he was choosing between joining the military and working in an inner-city liquor store, you would, if intelligently guided by statistics, advise him to join the military.

One other interesting thing to note about those stats — the stats of crimes in urban areas mark the results of a war, too. The war on drugs, upon which the interminable war on terrorism seems to be modeled. In the war on drugs, banning a health hazard leads to an explosion in deaths, jailings, and a larger circle of victims than just regulating sales of drugs would ever do. Typical state-as-perpetual-war solution – the state’s actions insure that the war will never end, as the object of it fades from sight. Among the little things one has to sacrifice to win the war is a host of freedoms, from our privacy to fair trials and sentences. And, of course, there is the political advantage of the wars: as the wars spectacularly fail, the braindead followers of the warmongers point to that failure to continue doing the same thing. Thus is created the economic miracle of a bankrupt policy profiting from its bankruptcy. The loaves and the fishes were nothin’ to that.

What the war on terrorism has done to downtown Baghdad, the war on drugs has done to downtown Detroit. Solution: stop the wars!

This is an old argument. American journalism has learned the art of writing on two levels, so that if a smart person reads carefully they’ll get approximately the right idea, whereas if a less-smart person skims the article they’ll get the wrong idea.

This allows defenders to say “No one who read the article carefully would believe…..” But newspapers write for a diverse audience, and they’re responsibility is to accurately inform everyone.

Disinformation methods include: misleading headlines, burying the lede, burying the story (on Page 16 or whatever), balancing accurate information with ridiculous claims, and so on.

This is done because accurate writing often brings a well-organized Republican firestorm. “If the facts are partisan, print the facts” should be the rule, but the actual rule is “Don’t write stories that make the Republicans look bad”.

No, the Democrats don’t have that kind of rapid response intimidation team, though we’re working on it.

A lot of people within the media are partisan Republicans, often hired from Republican campaign operations. George Will, Pat Buchanan, Safire, Noonan, Brooks, Krauthammer, and too many others to name. Comparable ex-Democrats (Stephanopolous, Matthews, Estrich, et al) are notably NOT partisans. There are very few partisan Democrats or liberals in the major media. (A lot of the Times liberals, for example, trashed Clinton).

I think that it’s possible that this piece was mutilated by editors. Often the written and published pieces are different.

Reynolds is such a dilettante. Why anyone takes him as a credible commentator is beyond me. The fact that he gets so much traffic is no more a sign of his erudition than the fact that flies love shit is a sign of the tastiness of excrement.

As Nick S notes, the fact that he quotes Dean Esmay shows just how desperate he is.

Its interesting how the conversation here follows the classic ‘stages of coping’ with loss.
First, in the original post, comes DENIAL: “This is why comparisons to death rates in civilian settings—even comparatively violent ones—are misguided. Anyone who thinks that someone walking around Philly is more likely to be violently attacked than a marine out on patrol in Baghdad is out of their mind.” (except, as the article states, with the particular subgroup-African American males of a certain age, in Philadelphia, it is correct). Then comes ANGER (“Oh, fuck Insty: even after showing the micro-cojones to quote the Philly native in Iraq he decides that one of his instapals—the eminently fuckwitted Dean Esmay—deserves the last word. What a complete tool.” Post #6. Notice that the post says virtually nothing. But it uses words like ‘fuck’ and ‘tool’-anger like this established legitimacy when real information doesn’t-anger is so authentic, man!). Then comes BARGAINING (“Similarly, I have no objections to their numbers on the comparative death rates for different services within the military, etc,…But the authors lead off with a couple of inappropriate comparisons” post #26, as well as several others). Then comes DEPRESSION (“The obvious question posed by the stats of American military deaths is whether there is connection between the comparative lack of American military fatalities and the way the Iraq war has been lost by the Americans.” post 37. I assume he’s unhappy that America has lost-this may be a presumptuous assumption. See also the original post “Its depressing to see a professor of demography…” and post #10 “The Washington Post of yesterday is gone, replaced by an irresponsible rag. How sad…”). Perhaps soon we will see the final stage of coping: ACCEPTANCE.

So, Thomas, Loser, and others who can’t understand what is going on; be understanding and realize they are dealing with the loss of a loved one, and you have to be patient; their dearly beloved, “QUAGMIRE,” is dying a slow and painful death.

Steve

If being a black man in America is more dangerous than fighting a war, why is it that people talk so much about the heroism of our troops? Shouldn’t there be SUVs riding around with the appropriate bumper stickers (e.g. “Support our Inner City Youth,” etc.)? After all, they face greater dangers and require a higher level of character and intelligence to survive and thrive. They would seem to be the true heroes, no? Perhaps the Republicans should stop glorifying American soldiers altogether and instead celebrate the simple courage of being a minority in America. Of course … that would require them to actually believe their propaganda, which I seriously doubt.

Good comeback Kieran. Instapundit is easily explained. The internet is for porn. Instapundit is Republican porn.

How about this for what is wrong w/ the article: the main idea at the front of the article is not supported by their evidence. Its pretty pathetic when the follow up on the main lead is all the reasons the main lead is misleading.

If you are even close to serious about making a fair argument, you would not open the article w/ the 8.42 number- in fact, it doesn’t even belong in the article. You have to at least start w/ the 1.53 or 4.37 numbers.

So to summarize, their are plenty of problems w/ this article, but the existence of the 3rd paragraph is the worst single offender.

“If being a black man in America is more dangerous than fighting a war,…”

Oh, it looks like stage 5, ACCEPTANCE, is finally arriving.

Steve

Don’t keep me hanging, Steve: if Iraq is now safer than inner city Philadelphia, what in God’s name are we doing spending billions of dollars keeping 100,000+ troops there? Anxiously awaiting your response.

kcindc (no. 44), and this applies to some others too: advances in Emergency Room medicine mean that trauma victims of all kinds have much higher survival rates than they did 40 years ago (the Vietnam era). In fact, there are large numbers of victims of inner-city violence who do not end up dead, but do end up paralyzed, brain-damaged etc. They aren’t very well-tracked statistically, however. I’m not sure where one could get numbers for the category “suffers permanent disability as a result of violent crime.” So a parent maybe can’t make a totally well-informed decision.

I can’t help but wonder how Instapundit, or the rest of the right-wing blogosphere, would react if someone published an article pointing out that the death toll from 9/11 had no significant impact on the overall US death rate in 2001, and opine that “it’s hard to look at these numbers and see the catastrophe”.

Hi, concern trolls:

There was no excuse for the following passage:

“One meaningful comparison is to the civilian population of the United States. That rate was 8.42 per 1,000 in 2003, more than twice that for military personnel in Iraq”

That is not “one meaningful comparison” by any standard. Something like that would get a zero on an introductory stat course.

The authors statement that if non-fatal casulties were included the numbers would likely be similar was not given adequate support, and was speculative.

If the authors were demographers, why could they not get the appropriate statistics? Any epidemiologist, statistician, or demographer should be able to find better numbers within a few days.

It was a bad, tendentious article. As written it either had no point, or gave a wrong impression. Period, end of story, case closed. Anyone who doesn’t understand that, needs to take a statistics course. Introductory courses are fairly cheap and you can enroll at any community college.

introstatperson, that may be the dumbest comment yet. Kieran, you must be proud to see the ignorant tearing down esteemed sociologists in your comments in an attempt to agree with you.

To several of the comments above, the title of the article is “Service in Iraq: Just How Risky?” That is the point. Not “How is the War Going?” not “Should We Have Invaded?”

Now, if that’s your title, then death rates are a reasonable focus. And, if you have death rates, then why not set the death rate for the entire population as the place to start the discussion? This seems reasonable. This is not to say that Kieran’s useful discussion of the risk to police officers is bad or unimportant, just that every article has a word limit. If you want to add something, you need to take something out. Which sentences/paragraphs would you take out?

One option is to take out this part:

One meaningful comparison is to the civilian population of the United States. That rate was 8.42 per 1,000 in 2003, more than twice that for military personnel in Iraq.

The comparison is imperfect, of course, because a much higher fraction of the American population is elderly and subject to higher death rates from degenerative diseases.

Would that make everyone happy? Would the article be reasonable then? Or is it also verbotten to mention the Philly figures?

I really want to understand how CT’ers would make this article better while allowing the authors to answer the title they pose in the question and keep within their word limit.

I really want to understand how CT’ers would make this article better while allowing the authors to answer the title they pose in the question and keep within their word limit.

David Kane,

Maybe including the death rate of Iraqi civilians.

Kieran claims:

Some of what they talk about in the second half of the article is interesting and important, and I said that in my original post.

No, you didn’t. It is going to be tough to have a reasonable discussion of this issue if you claim to have described some of their work as “interesting and important” when, in fact, you did no such thing.

Kieran claims:

Some of what they talk about in the second half of the article is interesting and important, and I said that in my original post.

No, you didn’t. It is going to be tough to have a reasonable discussion of this issue if you claim to have described some of their work as “interesting and important” when, in fact, you did no such thing.

Whoops, you’re right. I didn’t say it in my original post, and I apologise for mistakenly saying I did. So, let me say it now: some of what they say in the second half of the article is interesting and important, especially the stuff on differential risk across the various branches of service and the variation in death rates by race.

I really think it’s pathetic to demand that researchers avoid statements that can be misinterpreted. Kieran says:

Inevitably, people like Glenn Reynolds see numbers like this and—instead of thinking “Christ, inner city homicide rates are even remotely comparable to military deaths in Iraq!”—think, hey, “it’s hard to look at these numbers and see the catastrophe” that the mainstream media report on.

Well, yeah, Instapundit is a fool. But he’ll be spouting nonsense whether demographers report the facts or suppress them as Kieran urges. I think the facts support my ideology, so I say report the truth and let the chips fall where they may.

Kieran,

You seem to be saying that researchers should consider how Glenn Reynolds and his ilk might misinterpret their statements before saying anything. That’s ridiculous.

To several of the comments above, the title of the article is “Service in Iraq: Just How Risky?” That is the point. Not “How is the War Going?” not “Should We Have Invaded?”

Actually, having read the post, original article and all the comments, what I cannot understand is why the level of risk to the military in Iraq (as compared to anything you wish) is informative in and of itself. I would expect the best equipped, most powerful army in the world to have relatively low mortality rates during the tyoe of operaton underway in Iraq – it would be newsworthy if it were otherwise. Being such an obvious point, I think it highly unlikely that the only purpose of the article was to highlight this. It is fair to assume the authors are trying to imply a wider point about the success of the US in Iraq, especially given they use civilian mortality figures for some of their comparisons whereas they really should confine themselves to miltary figures in other similar operations if the only point is determine the level of risk to the military. The figures they use cannot be said to provide meaningful comparisons as the base scenarios are different. If you doubt that, it is just as legitimate a tactic to compare the mortality rate between soldiers who stay in the US and those who are deployed in Iraq.

“that comparison also meaningless, because who wouldn’t rather go to Saigon than to Bahgdad”

US troops serving in Vietnam would go on leave in Saigon. You don’t hear much about US troops going on leave in Bagdad, do you?

I think that this is a very interesting thread and I would urge Kieran or dsquared to revisit the topic again at the higher level to carry the conversation forward. dsquared writes:

In any case, some passages in that article (the comparison with Philadelphia most notably) seem to be more or less incapable of not being misinterpreted.

Again, I want to push Kieran and dsquared on the topic of how, if they were the editor for this article, they would suggest to fix it. Let’s focus on three statements of fact: the death rates for the overall US population, for US men 18-39 and for African American men 20-34 in Philadelphia.

dsquared implies but does not say that the last fact does not belong in the article since it is inevitable that it will be misinterpreted. Would dsquared, as editor, remove this fact? Would Kieran? Also, should/must the other two facts above be removed. Kieran seemed to feel that the first was a “stunt” and did not belong in the article. That is, if he were the editor, he would have removed it. True?

Once we know whether or not you would insist on removing these facts or just insist on better phrasing, more context, clearer explanation or whatever, then we can move forward in the discussion. I think most readers think that you think that these facts do not belong in an article of this type (by these authors, with this title), else why refer to it as a “stunt” or claim that misinterpretation is inevitable?

But, if you agree that it is reasonable to include these facts, then we can just work on better phrasing/explanation/context together and then make our sugesstions to the authors. And, Kumbaya, the world is a better place.

If I were the editor, I would pull all three facts. The piece purports to be about how risky it is to serve in Iraq. The important things to compare that to are – being a soldier in peace-time, and being a soldier in another war. (and then it’s useful to break down the risk into sub-categories – being a black soldier in Iraq, being an NCO in Iraq, being a marine in Iraq)

Per a comment on Lawyers Guns and Money, the death rate in the peacetime military is about 0.57 per 1000, roughly a sixth of the starting comparison (the overall civilian population, cancer wards and all) used by the author’s article. I haven’t independently checked that number, but it does seem comprable to that provided by a little Googling (one of the hits was a RedState article also trying to minimize concern for the war dead).

The article reads more like popular science than “political journalism.” And Glenn Reynolds isn’t a “careless reader.” Good luck trying to write something that he can’t willfully distorts.

I enjoy reading popular science articles in the newspaper, and I don’t think people should demand that they be turned into political journalism. What’s next? Will you start demanding that articles about fusion research have a pro-environment message? That articles about cloning research criticize the religious right?

So I don’t think the point of the article was that things in Iraq are going swimmingly. One natural interpretation is Kieran’s: “even in a real, live, shooting war, only a comparatively small number of troops in an army ever see direct, front-line duty.” But I don’t think that was the author’s main point either. Their main point was more like: how should we think about mortality rates?

Finally, the comparison to “African American men ages 20 to 34 in Philadelphia,” is perfectly meaningful. It’s basically the right statistic to think about if you’re a black male in Philadelphia thinking about joining the Army. Unless you’re assigned to a combat position, it’s relatively safe. Even Iraq is fairly safe for US troops, since most of them are in places like the green zone.

David Kane wrote:

But, if you agree that it is reasonable to include these facts, then we can just work on better phrasing/explanation/context together and then make our sugesstions to the authors.

Hmmm. “Make our suggestions to the authors?” Why? It’s not as if one is allowed a mulligan on op-ed pieces, and it certainly wouldn’t qualify as publishable in any academic journal. In this case, it may be that criticism is more appropriate than suggestions for revisions. In any event, I think that the question isn’t quite “is it reasonable to include these facts” but rather “is it reasonable to include these facts when total article length is constrained to 800 words?” Perhaps the op-ed was cut down from some longer piece, but what’s left is factually correct and analytically shoddy. If you’ve read much of Preston’s work you’d know that Sam isn’t known for shoddy or incomplete analysis but this actually reads like something a first-year graduate student might write — before he or she got creamed in seminar.

Ragout, wouldn’t the relevant comparison for those Philadelphians you mention be with the death rate for African American men ages 20 to 34 in the Army in Iraq, rather than the US military in Iraq as a whole? Why have the demographic restrictions on one part of the comparison but not the other, and why exclude the branch of the service?

Several people seem to have trouble distinguishing between editorial judgment and censorship. There is no First Amendment right to have whatever you write published in the Post.

thomas, I’m well aware that women are serving in Iraq, but I’m using the comparison sets in the linked article. Direct your complaints of sexism to Samuel Preston, who thought the “death rate for U.S. men ages 18 to 39” and “death rate for African American men ages 20 to 34 in Philadelphia” figures were more relevant than the figures for all 18 to 39 year olds, or all 18 to 65 year olds.

(the comparison to the entire population is still not relevant, unless there are 6 year old girls and 82 year old men now serving in the US Army.)

thomas, that’s a subset used in a comparison with a different subset. The ratio of deaths to person years is not qualified – it’s all troops, of all ages.
The Iraq deaths aren’t all deaths by violence, but they don’t include illness, afaik, because those troops are sent to hospitals in Europe or the US. But that’s why I said the article should have included comparisons with military peace-time deaths, and deaths in other wars. If they’d included military peace-time deaths they could have said “Just being in the army is dangerous, because there are a certain number of accidents etc every year. Compared to this base level, Iraq is X times more dangerous.”

And thomas, you accused me of sexism (and ageism). It’s a bit rich for you to get huffy on the part of the authors, when I point out that the sexist assumptions are in their figures, not mine.

There’s no longer any rhyme or reason to your defence of this article, is there? It’s all just random bullshit flinging and attempts at distraction…

No, I don’t buy it. People have a strong sensory impression of how cold it is when it snows, or how cold their freezer is, but they don’t have a good mental image of a statistic like the mortality rate per thousand in the US. (And most people aren’t young black men in Philadelphia, so the article is not comparing the statistics to their personal experience.) So the article isn’t proceeding from familiar examples to the unfamiliar, it’s comparing one hard-to-grasp number to another.

That should obviously read “[making the comparison] is much less so” in my above.

steve seems right on. Except for the fact that the mean surface temperature on venus is around 400 degress centigrade. Well, at least he’s keeping his batting average steady.

I think a more important point than how many US troops are killed, or even how many US troops are injured or how many Iraqis are killed and injured, is the fact that our policies are set more by the public’s tolerance for casualties than by any principled system of law and morality.

Think about it. The US going to war *should* be based on great self-restraint and adherence to not abusing its power in pursuit of its own interests in unjust ways – but it’s not, today.

All of that self-restraint, all of the systems designed to restrict war from the US’s own laws, to our democracy’s system of government, to the UN, do not stop the war direction.

The only limit the US seems to recognize is the public’s weariness of casualties.

This is going to be a far more important issue in coming wars, because the Pentagon is creating new weapons systems which will greatly reduce US casualties, including space-based systems.

What, then, will be the restricting factor on the use of military force? Almost no restriction.

So, it’s fine to note the problems with propaganda that minimize the casualties of war, but it’s important not to forget the larger problem that our society has failed to create any effective system for which to set war policies, which makes principles, and not casualties, the rules.

And we’re moving even further from policy by principles, in attacking the UN.