It's Murder - Comparing Death Rates In Iraq And The US

A Note For Readers,

A few days ago, I noticed that my UPC colleague Fester had worked up some statistics to debunk the common rightwing assertion that most of Iraq is no more dangerous - has no higher a death rate - than America, which he had used in a discussion in the comments section of a post at Simianbrain. I asked Fester to turn his comments into a post for Newshog, and here it is. It's one of those posts I know I will refer to time and again in my own posts and in arguments with those who try to downplay the severity of the troubles in Iraq. So although it's my tag at the end of the post, the work and the kudos for such an effective debunk are all Fester's if you happen to use it yourself.

Regards, C


One of my pet peeves about the pro-war supporters is the tendency among some to be completely numerically illiterate, when that is needed to attempt to score a propaganda point. For instance, it's fairly common to see a statement that is structured along the lines of "Iraq is less dangerous than Place X" where Place X is someplace in the United States or the US in general. I first blogged about this structure of statements in October, 2003 where I demonstrated that the absolute lowest risk ratio for US troops in Iraq is at least 3:1 compared to the same age adjusted populations in the United States as a whole.

Now we can see the same idiocy and blindness about the risk of civilian lives in Iraq and how it really is not that bad as more people get murdered in the United States than die in car bombing attacks in Iraq - so really those rose petals are just being stored for a non-windy day...

In 2003 the US murder rate (From FBI, in an Excel Sheet) was 5.7 murders/negligent manslaughters per 100,000 people. That works out to be about 16,500 murders in 2003. Seeing that Iraq is about 1/12 the population of the US (27 million v. ~300 million), if both nations were equally violent and equally likely to have an individual die a violent death you would expect to see roughly 1375 violent deaths in all of Iraq for the entire year. If you want to adjust for differences in medical care (one of the drivers in the reduction of the US murder rate over the past generation is improved emergency medicine) you could reasonably expect a +50% rate of death from the same proportion of violent incidents or roughly 2,000 violent Iraqi deaths. This figure works out to be about 5.47 violent deaths per day or roughly 165 per month.

In the car bombing campaign alone in the past month, there have been approximately 500 deaths, or three times the death rate from car bombs alone than we would expect to see if Iraq was only as violent (medicine adjusted) as the United States was in 2003. This is neglecting fatalities from gun fights, it is neglecting fatalities from mortar attacks, it is neglecting fatalities from US air strikes, it is neglecting fatalities from random violence, it is neglecting the high levels of criminality that is endemic to Iraq as the ability of the state to function has broken down and has been broken for two years now.

Now the UN and the Iraqi Ministry of Development and Planning have conducted a standard survey that covers all of Iraq from May 2003 to May 2004 and have concluded that the absolute lowest excess death figure that they could attribute to combat was between 18,000 to 29,000 Iraqis. They noted that their methodology under-counts fatalities as families that are killed as a complete family are not able to be surveyed.

The study period covers twelve months for all but three provinces (Kurdistan covers 16 months), but working with the assumption that most of the violence is happening in non-Kurdish areas we can calculate comparable rates if Iraq was the United States.In the twelve month study period, taking the lowest boundary of 18,000 deaths, this works out to be about 1,500 violent deaths per month that are directly attributable to some military action by some party.

Doing just a straight line approximation, this would have the United States losing 18,000 individuals per month due to violence.

This is a rate higher than the annual US murder toll. If we correct for differences in medical care, the United States, if it was as "safe" as Iraq, would be seeing 12,000 or so citizens dying per month, 144,000 every year, due to violence. The unadjusted risk ratio is 13:1 for Iraqis to die a violent death when compared against the chance of an American to die due to a homicide or negligent manslaughter. The medical adjustment reduces the risk to 8.3:1.

So I just cranked out a bunch of math to prove my point, but I really do not get this obsession on saying things are as good in Iraq as they are at home. It should be obvious, without even looking at Table 2.19 where 37% of the entire country reported hearing gunfire or explosions in their neighborhood every day and 60% of the country reports gunfire or explosions at least once a week in their neighborhood. The absolute worst parts of the American urban ghettos in the midst of crack turf wars may have been able to sustain that pace of violence, but those were extremely rare and isolated cases.

We don't need to look at tables, we need to look at our history. The last car bombing in the United States was the attack against the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City which killed 168 individuals. That was ten years ago. However, we did not just shrug it off, we changed our security metrics, we cracked down on the far right groups that fostered McVeigh and Nickols. It affected us as a nation deeply. Baghdad has had 126 car bombs in the past three months, and twenty five during 2004.

Major, 100+ fatality car bombings have occurred several times a year for the past two years in Iraq. The United States has experienced no car bombs during this time frame. The same applies to suicide bombings, company sized ambushes of the New York Police Department, the overrunning of the Montana State House, the capturing of the governor of Missouri and the assassination of the director of the Washington D.C. METRO system. These are common types of events in Iraq. If the US was as dangerous as Iraq, we would be seeing these actions occurring here. We don't.

Advanced math or statistics is not needed to say that there is a significant difference in risk and security between Iraq and the United States. All that is required is some willingness to look at history and an unwillingness to believe that clapping louder will make things better.