Fatality flaw

The U.S. death rate in Iraq is indeed rising, but some comparisons are still in order | Joel Belz

Almost two years ago, when the war in Iraq was only four months old, I noted in this space how manipulative the mainstream media had been in their portrayal of the number of American deaths. We ran that column under the headline, "It could be worse"—and provided some historical comparisons to make the point.

Surely enough, in the 700 days since then, things have indeed gotten worse in Iraq. We owe it to careful readers to update our statistics, and we are doing that on this page. We will not bury the fact that the toll in American lives has climbed from 1.4 per day when we first discussed this topic to 2.1 per day over the course of the whole Iraqi war.

You can obviously make the argument, if that is your purpose, that an increase from 1.4 to 2.1 is a ghastly 50 percent increase in the daily death rate. And statistically, of course, that is indeed the case.