Iraq Fatalitity Numbers

Instapundit pointed to this post yesterday and I've been thinking about it quite a bit since. And before I start - I know what Twain said about statistics.

The key to the Gateway Pundit post was this graph. The graph shows that the number of military dead in Iraq and Afghanistan just reached the halfway point of the total military dead from the Clinton adminstration.

I agree with the commenters who said that the numbers are decieving because the Bush numbers don't include all the military dead (including those who died in accidents, or natural causes or suicide) whereas the Clinton numbers do. I don't have numbers for Bush's second term but in Clinton's first term there were 4302 total military deaths whereas Bush's first term had 5187 total military deaths. In Bush's first term there were "only" 885 more military deaths even though we were fighting to free an estimated 31 million people in Afghanistan and another 26 million people in Iraq.

Let me toss out two more sets of statistics. The first is from the leftish Iraq Body Count who estimates that a minimum of 64,133 or a maximum of 70,243 civilians have been killed since the start of the Iraq War (which again is misleading because this is actually just a continuation of the first Gulf War). I want to compare that to something Andrew Sullivan posted just before the war started:

Based on Iraqi government figures, UNICEF estimates that containment kills roughly 5,000 Iraqi babies (children under 5 years of age) every month, or 60,000 per year. Other estimates are lower, but by any reasonable estimate containment kills about as many people every year as the [first] Gulf War - and almost all the victims of containment are civilian, and two-thirds are children under 5.

People like to think things exist in a vacuum but if these sets of numbers are correct - then doing nothing (i.e. keeping the status quo that existed prior to 2003) would have cost the lives of 240,000 children under 5 in Iraq by now - never mind the number of adults or children over the age of 5. Think about that for a little while.

I think short term that things are improving in Iraq to a point where when the 2008 elections heat up - Iraq will be much less of an interest to voters. Some people will be purposely ignoring good news coming out of Iraq because it will disprove their anti-war, Code Pink positions. There is more flipping and flopping predicted on the horizon.

I also think that in the long term that the idea of "flypaper" will find much favor with historians. Two years ago I was on the "flypaper" bandwagon and I remain still. I believe David Warren is credited with coining the term. Here's a brief explanation from him:

....While engaged in the very difficult business of building a democracy in Iraq -- the first democracy should it succeed in the entire history of the Arabs -- President Bush has also quite consciously to my information created a new playground for the enemy away from Israel and even farther away from the United States itself. By the very act of proving this lower ground he drains terrorist resources from other swamps.

This is the meaning of Mr. Bush's "bring 'em on" taunt from the Roosevelt Room on Wednesday when he was quizzed about the "growing threat to U.S. forces" on the ground in Iraq. It should have been obvious that no U.S. President actually relishes having his soldiers take casualties. What the media and U.S. Democrats affect not to grasp is that the soldiers are now replacing targets that otherwise would be provided by defenseless civilians both in Iraq and at large. The sore thumb of the U.S. occupation -- and it is a sore thumb equally to Baathists and Islamists compelling their response -- is not a mistake. It is carefully hung flypaper.