U.S. TROOP DEATHS IN IRAQ: AN ANALYSIS

Overview

If recent short-term trends continue, the number of U.S. troops killed as a result of George Bush’s order to invade Iraq will exceed the number of people killed as a result of Osama bin Laden’s order to attack the United States in February 2007.

Data

Motivation

Obviously, any analysis like this — especially with the comparison between the number of troop deaths and the number of victims of September 11 — has a political motivation. It is intentionally incendiary.

My goal is not to equate the two events, but to frame the Administration’s actions in terms of their human toll. September 11 is an uncontested and quantifiable tragedy. Iraq is approaching similar dimensions. The simple cost in lives is an element that is often missing from various political and moral arguments over the invasion and its aftermath. Three years after the start of the war, troop deaths often go completely unreported, even by opponents.

Iraqi civilians, military and police, other coalition troops, and American expatriates and contractors are excluded from the count not for any moral reason, but for a political one: to provide as conservative and American-centric a comparison as possible. This, of course, vastly over-simplifies the brutal calculus of the war; the actual number of lives lost is dozens of times higher.

Methodology

Troop death data comes from icasualties.org and relies on the accuracy of their reporting. The period used covers the start of U.S. operations on March 19, 2003 through March 31, 2006.

Six- and twelve-month moving averages were calculated to provide both long-term and short-term trend lines. The last six months was arbitrarily used to do a linear extrapolation of the average of these two trends based on their confluence.

Notes

The twelve-month moving average is a rough parabola, trending downward.

The six months that make up the basis for the extrapolation is the longest consecutive period during the war where troop deaths have fallen, twice as long as any previous period.

Caveats

A linear extrapolation is naive, as the data has not been historically linear. This analysis is, at best, a straw man.

The six-month downward trend in deaths should not give the impression that violence in the country is decreasing: in fact, sectarian fighting has dramatically increased. The decreased loss of American life may be attributable to reduced activity or retrenchment in the face of this strife.

The author is not a statistician and does not claim competence in the area.