Sunday, March 19, 2006

More on the numbers

From a comment in the Volokh thread Terrye mentioned below.
Total military casualties under Clinton's first term from Jan 1993 to Dec 1996 inclusive, vs. Bush's first term from Jan 2001 to Dec 2004 (which includes the Iraq war) is interesting. Those numbers are Clinton's 4302 dead during peacetime vs. Bushe's [sic] 5187 dead during war.

In fact more people died under Clinton due to accidents, 2241, than died under Bush due to hostile action, 1102, during those periods.

These are incredible numbers. If instead of going to war with Iraq in response to 9/11 we had merely doubled the size of our army and stayed home, then we would have suffered about twice the number of military deaths. Yes, the increased amount would have been double. Instead of going from around 4000 to 5000, the result would have been from around 4000 to 6000.


I've noted before that mortality rates seem quite low; here's the evidence.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

seneca:

I remember reading something powerline had up some time back about this. If I recall it correctly between 1983 and 1996 we lost about 16,000 people.

A lot of the casualties in Iraq are not combat related. In fact it is amazing how many die in vehicle accidents.

chuck said...

A lot of the casualties in Iraq are not combat related.

Umm, not really. If you go look at previous months you will see a few accidents but a large majority of the casualties were due to IEDs. If you look at the figures for March just two of the 16 casualties are due to accidents or non-combat related incidents. Of the remaining 14, eight are due to IEDs of VBIEDs. Some of the casualties are also due to injuries sustained as long ago as November. I'll be happy when all the casualties are non-combat related, but we aren't there yet.

Syl said...

Dems are using two words every time they speak. I find them to be deceitful and dishonest by pushing these words into the press and public:

Incompetent and disaster.

I call BS on all of them.

Okay, sorry, off topic for this post. But it's all the same bs.

Syl said...
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