Jonah Goldberg’s Innumeracy: The Quagmire Deepens
Posted by
KTK
Jonah Goldberg of the NRO “Corner” (aptly described once as “Lucianne Goldberg’s idiot kid”) recently took issue with the question of military deaths in Iraq. Quoting with approval, and no trace of critical faculty, an ill-informed - or just dishonest - Op-Ed in the New York Sun by Alicia Colon, he blindly accepted her claim that the death total was even higher under Clinton and said he’d “like to know more”.
My homie, and occasional Lean Left commenter, Brooklynite, obliges him here:
The first thing worth knowing about the numbers is that they compare total military deaths in Clinton’s first term with Iraq War deaths under George W. Bush. All told, there were 5,076 US military fatalities between 2003 and 2005, not 3,133 between 2003 and early 2007.
The second thing worth knowing is that deaths of US military personnel dropped steadily over the course of the Clinton administration, as they had under Reagan and George HW Bush. In 1981, Reagan’s first year in office, there were 2,380 US military deaths. In 2000, Clinton’s last year, there were 758. The military got steadily better at protecting the lives of its servicemembers during Clinton’s two terms in office, in other words, and Colon’s use of his first-term numbers as a point of reference deliberately obscures that fact.
The third thing worth knowing is that it’s not just combat deaths that rise in time of war. Military deaths by accident and illness doubled between 2000 and 2005, and homicides rose by a third. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have placed stresses on the military that don’t appear in combat fatality figures.
[follow the link and check out the highly revealing graph - hint: the huge rocket-trail upward on the right side is Shrub’s handiwork]
and here:
A lot of conservatives are adopting the line that the deaths from the Iraq War are comparable to what we’d see in peacetime, and in one sense they’re correct — a generation ago, we did see these kind of mortality figures in the peacetime armed forces. But those mortality rates weren’t acceptable then, and the military worked hard to bring them down.
The military is still a dangerous occupation, even in peacetime. But — and I can hardly believe I have to say this — war is more dangerous than peace. In 2000, 758 American servicemembers died. In 2005, 1,951 American servicemembers died. Those aren’t comparable figures. They represent twelve hundred young Americans whose families are grieving them today. (And the statistics don’t speak to those who were grievously injured that year, or to the local dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
Good work.
Thanks for the link. It’s really appalling how this bit of disinformation is spreading — I hear Limbaugh gave it a big boost this afternoon.
Comment 2/21/2007