The details page has very nice filtering capability, too.

Riyadh delenda est!

What happened to you on this one, Dean? There are several glaring problems with your analysis.

First, the chart represents the number of deaths, not casualties; there have been thousands more casualties.

Second, although I believe that there has been a decline in the number of attacks (at least since Saddam was captured), this chart clearly does not show a "long decline" of so-called "casualties" with a mere outlier (Nov.). If anything, the chart suggests that the number of hostile deaths have increased since the end of the combat phase.

Also, while I understand your point that the 417 deaths should be put in context/compared to other wars, I doubt whether there were many "hours" during WWII in which we lost 417 soldiers, outside of Pearl Harbor.

i really don't appreciate the use of graph in blog. i'll excuse myself.....

(but it's a great point.)

The wounded are included in a different graph, but for some reason that data for that only begins August 30.

The war didn't start until half way through March. Why then does this graph say there were over 10 Coalition deaths at the very start of the month?

And 80 hostile deaths, I might add...

Okay, killed, not "casualties."

But what we see here is a clear and sharp uptick around the end of October and through November, then a decline back to about where we were on the downward trend before late Oct and November turned ugly.

If that is not clear enough to you from the graph, then here are the numbers killed by hostile file by month:

0: MARCH 80
1: APRIL 60
2: MAY 7
3: JUNE 24
4: JULY 28
5: AUGUST 23
6: SEPTEMBER 18
7: OCTOBER 35
8: NOVEMBER 94
9: DECEMBER 32
10: JANUARY 16

(January, obviously, isn't over yet.)

By the way, check your history. Look at the casualty figures for either the Battle of Okinawa or the D-Day invasion, just for example. We were sending wave after wave of men to their deaths in the face of machine gun fire and brutal mortar fire. Literally tens of thousands died in each of those invasions.

Just a thought: this graph was based on information from the DoD, CENTCOM, and the British Ministry of Defense. All three have a well-documented history of lying about death and casuality figures, especially while the conflict in question is ongoing.

Yet you seem to accept these figures as gospel, and I was wondering why.

Don,

Well documented by whom? Well documented where?

Yours,
Wince

well documented by aliens, and people with tinfoil hats, off course ;)

Yeah, well-documented by who? Can you provide a list of military people who've been killed who are not listed by the government? That's the only documentation I'd accept, that's for sure.

And there were years in Vietnam when the less were killed. The first three years of escalated conflict to be more precise (1962-64)

And the Vietnam Wall Memorial statistics, breakdown by year (scroll down).

Yes, yes, the conflicts are different. But we don't, yet know how.

War technology has made it easier to start a war as it limits our casualties.

I'm all warm and fuzzy.

Lunaville is an excellent resource. Antiwar, but scrupulously accurate.

"Lying about casualties, esp. when war is ongoing." --- So, the Vietnam Memorial has 58,000 names. Some names were "held back" until that war was over? Or, the DoD was honest then, and started lying later? Horseshit. Tin-foil hat time.

In the ONE MONTH of the Battle of the Bulge, the Americans suffered 81,000 casualties (killed, wounded, POW).

How about Russia? 20 million DEAD in Great Patriotic War. 5 million per year. 400,000 every month. 12,000+ a day! 500 an hour. On that scale we've been war for an hour.

Oh yeah, every year 35,000 American die in car accidents.

And about 1,000 in bicycle accidents.

Roughly the same (1,000) in boating accidents.

Same approx. number in train accidents.

IT'S A BOATING QUAGMIRE!

Dean:
"It's especially instructive when you break out deaths due to hostile fire rather than by accidents and medical problems. (People still get run over by trucks or tanks, fall off rooves, have heart attacks, etc.)"

No, according to pacifists, we'd all live forever if only we'd renounce warfare and surrender our liberties to a One-World superstate.

Interesting chart. I notice that, especially toward the beginning, there's a zero-sum or inverse ratio: the more of the enemy we kill, the fewer of our own are killed. That's why we do it. Toward the end, as we come closer to victory, it becomes more positive-sum.

Commissar:

In the ONE MONTH of the Battle of the Bulge, the Americans suffered 81,000 casualties (killed, wounded, POW).

That would be 2,613 per day, if anyone's counting, assuming a 31-day month.

The Battle of the Bulge was not the bloodiest battle of that era, by the way. Okinawa was. We tend to forget that it was the South Pacific campaign in general that was often the most violent and horrible, not the European or African campaigns. (Not that they were trivial, because they sure as hell were not.)

Like I said: there were HOURS in WWII wherein we lost more people than in the entire Iraq conflict to date.

Andrew: Of course, you did pick the three least-bloody years of the Vietnam conflict. A conflict in which the Russians and the Chinese were busy helping the North Vietnamese with money and weapons and intel and diplomacy.

I suppose one might believe that the Syrians and
Iranians are helping the Iraqi resistance. Indeed, they probably are. But I doubt very, very much that those nations will be able to muster the kind of resources that the Soviets and Chinese did.

We know for a fact that Iraqi people are better off today than they were one year ago. Isn't that something worth celebrating?

Dean says: "By the way, check your history. Look at the casualty figures for either the Battle of Okinawa or the D-Day invasion, just for example. We were sending wave after wave of men to their deaths in the face of machine gun fire and brutal mortar fire. Literally tens of thousands died in each of those invasions."

No offense, Dean, but I think you are the one who should check his history if you think "Literally tens of thousands died" in the D-Day invasion. You're way off base there.

Don't get me wrong, I think number of casaulties we've taken in Iraq is historically low and it's good to remind people of this, but I don't think that chart supports your assertion that US deaths are decresing.....yet. Hopefully we will see a more definite decrease going foward (since Saddam's capture).

Unfortunately, I think it's going to take another big attack on US soil before many people will begin to accept any significant number of US casualties, even when that significant number is historically low when viewed in the context of other wars.

Okinawa death toll: 100,000 Japanese soldiers, at least 24,000 civilians, and 12,000 American soldiers.

Dean --

You sound like Robert McNamara.

I'm just saying.

For the vast majority of Americans, comparisons don't matter. Graphs don't matter. History doesn't matter. Political science doesn't matter. Very few people read web logs. Very few people intellectualize these things. It's not a bad thing, or a good thing. It's just who we are.

Probably the only statistic that most people will even come close to remembering is this one:

U.S. death toll reaches 500

Who knows why? We just fixate on round numbers. 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 1,000, 10,000, etc.

It is what it is.

One exception: 87 billion. That isn't a round number.

The vast majority don't read newspapers either, rarely watch the news, and often don't vote because they just don't care.

Among those who do care, however, graphs and figures and historical perspective do matter, because they give people a sense of perspective. It makes them less reactionary.

Which is why pointing things like this out does matter. A lot, so far as I'm concerned. Especially when we know the mainstream media tends toward an "if it bleeds it leads" mentality, and it's too easy for most people to get the wronheaded notion that we're getting slaughtered over there, when in fact we are kicking ass.

Failure to recognize this--the disconnect between what people were seeing on TV and what was actually happened--ended the Vietnam war, because people became convinced the conflict was unwinnable.

Oh, and by the way Ara? The McNamara thing? Cheap shot. He wasn't an incompetent boob because he understood history or had a sense of perspective. He was an incompetent boob because he was an incompetent boob.

In fact, let me go further: During WWII, casualty figures were printed in newspapers every single day. People didn't stop supporting the war because of that. If anything it made them more determined.

But people considered it incredibly tacky to take cheap potshots at the President's leadership on the war, because they understood how important what we were doing was and understood that being a backseat driver is childishly easy and very annoying.

Also, they firmly believed we could win. And that failure to win would be a betrayal of their sons who died.

Also, the press wasn't afraid to be on our side.

Wince:

Documented by whom? Well, I read Neil Sheehan's BRIGHT SHINING LIE a few years ago, and he offered a concise round-up of military lying before launching into his specific story about "cooking the books" in Vietnam. The bibliography to his book should point you to a lot of good primary sources.

Speaking of primary sources, Daniel Ellsberg---the long-time cold warrior who got so fed up he released the 7000 page smoking gun called the Pentagon Papers---published a memoir about it called SECRETS, which is now out in paperback. I haven't picked it up yet, but I'm sure he has some interesting insights about military lying, at least fron '45 to '68.

The point I'm trying to make is this: The Military-Industrial Complex---NOT the people getting killed, the people who profit from people getting killed---don't always tell the whole truth. Therefore, any data from them should be viewed with a sceptical eye, but most of my blogging pals seem to accept official gov't press releases as gospel truth.

The first casuality of war and all that. That's all I'm sayin'

Of course, I have it on very good authority that I may use tinfoil headgear, so there it is.

The McNamara thing? Cheap shot. He wasn't an incompetent boob because he understood history or had a sense of perspective. He was an incompetent boob because he was an incompetent boob.

He wasn't an incompetent boob. He was extremely competent. Remember, he was quintessentially "the best and the brightest."

That was the irony.

No, McNamara's problem was that he was "a soul-less technocrat; an IBM computer with legs. He treated the war like it was another Ford Motor Company corporate enterprise."

You're not like that at all Dean. You've got heart and soul.

But when you trot out the charts and graphs, it makes you seem ... cold.

(BTW, hat tip to Charles Taylor who wrote the review of "Fog of War," the Errol Morris film about McNamara.)

I think there's soulless about people who act like there's something trivial and meaningless about casualties we've suffered in past conflicts without recognizing the ramifications about what that says about us today.

"I don't like your charts and graphs" is, to me, just another way of saying, "I don't appreciate you telling me that what we're going through now is bearable."

McNamara was totally incompetent. Yes, he was one of the "best and brightest," but he tried to apply business lessons he'd learned to military operations. His lack of understanding of just how inappropriate that could be is what made him such a lousy civil servant, not his tendency to use charts and graphs.

If you don't think guys like MacArthur and Eisenhower looked at charts and graphs in order to help them get a sense of perspective, you're just being silly.