By More, I Mean Fewer, Of Course

The Post may sink to a new low of dishonest, fact-free coverage of the Iraq clusterfuck with today's op-ed on The War in West Philadelphia. The op-ed, by a surgeon who spent six months in Iraq--includes the following line: "More young men are killed each day on the streets of America than on the worst days of carnage and loss in Iraq. "

If you've been paying attention, though, you know that's just not true. Oh, it may be true if you count only American military casualties in Iraq. But that seems morally callous, it best, doesn't it? And one would think that a physician would value all life, not just American life. So, if you take all casualties into account, which it seems that a factual account should, and especially if you remember that the United States has more than ten times the population of Iraq, the homicide rate is much higher in Iraq since the invasion than in the United States. What's scary is just how wrong the statement is. It seems that even a little factual research shows that it's wrong. Exactly comparable figures aren't readily available, but here's what I found in 15 minutes of research.

The FBI uniform crime report identified almost 17,000 homicides nationwide in 2005. From a quick Google search, that was the last year for which data seemed to be available. It's possible that the murder rate has surged in the last two years, but I would be surprised if it were much different. For what it's worth, the highest murder rate in Table 1 at the link is over 24,000 in 1993.

The Iraq Body Count estimates that, for the 12-month period ending March 2007, 73 Iraqi civilians were dying every day, on average. If you just take 73 and multiply it by the number of days in a year, you come up with a number much greater than 17,000--more than 26,000. So even in the worse year in the United States, 1993, the murder rate didn't exceed what the civilian casualty rate has been in Iraq in recent months--and that's before you control for the fact that Iraq has one-tenth the population of the United States.

And that's the Iraqi civilian death rate in recent months--if one added in U.S. military casualties, at over 1,000/year at this point, the conclusion has to be clear--more "young men" are dying in Iraq than Americans are dying in the United States, each day, and especially on the worst days of carnage. The same IBC report gives some pretty grisly murder numbers from the Baghdad morgue from late 2006--over 1,000 murders/month identified in just that one morgue.

I'm actually a little surprised to see this tired talking point resuscitated on the Post op-ed page--you remember, the "American cities are dangerous, too" line. I thought that one was in its last throes some time back.