The ratio of deaths to person-years, .00392, or 3.92 deaths per 1,000 person-years, is the death rate of military personnel in Iraq.How does this rate compare with that in other groups? 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. 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.
The death rate of American troops in Vietnam was 5.6 times that observed in Iraq...
In both the Army and the Marines, enlisted personnel have 40 percent higher mortality than officers. The excess mortality of enlisted soldiers is diminished by the high mortality of the lowest-ranking officers, lieutenants, who are typically the leaders of combat patrols. Lieutenants have the highest mortality of any rank in the Army, 19 percent higher than all Army troops combined...
Hispanics have a death risk about 20 percent higher than non-Hispanics, and blacks have a death risk about 30 to 40 percent lower than that of non-blacks...
The number of wounded in Iraq through March 31, 2006, was 7.5 times the number of dead; the rate at which wounds are incurred was one per 33 troops per year.
Read the whole article for further details.
4 comments:
So then, by this rationale, it's really no big deal that 2600 American citizens are dead. (About the same number that died in the World Trade Center. Are we even now? Can we stop?)
Boy you guys are really stooping low to feel better about waging this war. Some day, when the bloom is off your rose, you're going to deal with the guilt of it. I think we're already starting to feel the great national depression that comes from doing something terrible to innocent people.
I'll never see any of this posted, will I? It's enough that you read it.
As for your first comment, anonymous, it's called "perspective". You should try getting some. And guilt? That's something you lefties feel for winning, for some reason.
As for your second comment, I'm truly sorry it was over 12 hrs since I last accessed this blog and posted comments. Yours is obviously so important, though, that I should check every hour to see if someone who can't even identify himself has posted yet another attack on me.
You, anonymous, are a fool, and I'm happy to post your comments to show everyone, in your own words, that you are just that.
Hey, look what I just read on Instapundit:
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THE POLITICS OF THE WAR: Bill Stuntz, writing in the Weekly Standard, says that voter dissatisfaction with the war stems as much from a sense that Bush isn't fighting hard enough as from a sense that it's going badly: "Voters may indeed want America either to win or get out of Iraq. But I bet they'd prefer winning to getting out. The real problem is that we aren't doing either." Michael Barone, however, sees some spine-stiffening among the electorate.
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So much for that national depression.
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