Iraq and DC

During our trip to DC, my step-dad Scott made a comment about an email he had received that made the claim that Iraq was a safer place to live than our nation's capital. This comment caught me off guard. I have spent a little over a third of a year in DC over the past 4 years and I have never once seen a car explode, a man running down the street with an automatic weapon, or violent protests in the street. I realize DC has its problems with violent crime, but it just did not jive with me that it was on par with Iraq.

The email my step-dad referred to was a report given on newsmax.com on the 29th of May, 2006. This is what it said:

Iraq Less Violent than Washington, D.C.

Despite media coverage purporting to show that escalating violence in Iraq has the country spiraling out of control, civilian death statistics complied by Rep. Steve King, R-IA, indicate that Iraq actually has a lower civilian violent death rate than Washington, .C.

Appearing with Westwood One radio host Monica Crowley on Saturday, King said that the incessantly negative coverage of the Iraq war prompted him to research the actual death numbers.

"I began to ask myself the question, if you were a civilian in Iraq, how could you tolerate that level of violence," he said. "What really is the level of violence?"

Using Pentagon statistics cross-checked with independent research, King said he came up with an annualized Iraqi civilian death rate of 27.51 per 100,000.

While that number sounds high - astonishingly, the Iowa Republican discovered that it's significantly lower than a number of major American cities, including the nation's capital.

"It's 45 violent deaths per 100,000 in Washington, D.C.," King told Crowley.

Other American cities with higher violent civilian death rates than Iraq include:

· Detroit - 41.8 per 100,000

· Baltimore - 37.7 per 100,000

· Atlanta - 34.9 per 100,000

· St. Louis - 31.4 per 100,000

The American city with the highest civilian death rate was New Orleans before Katrina - with a staggering 53.1 deaths per 100,000 - almost twice the death rate in Iraq.

This is what I found after having researched this topic for myself:

Washington DC

The total number of homicides that have taken place in DC since the beginning of 2003 is 811. These numbers only go up through 2006 as the data from 2007 has yet to be totally finished. So to be fair in our comparison we can add in 482 homicides twice, for the years of 2007 and 2008 (which is only half way over). The number 482 represents the highest homicide rate DC has had in close to 50 years, which happened in 1991. Having added an outstandingly high number twice (especially when you consider the homicide total in 2006 was a 169), the total we will use is 1,775.

For a more historical perspective, the total number of homicides in DC since 1960 is 11,404.

The total number of aggravated assaults that have occurred in DC since 2003 is 17,125. Again, these data are only through 2006. If we take the average number of aggravated assaults in DC from 2003-2006, which is 4,281, and add them to our previous total two times to account for 2007 and 2008, our new total in 25,714. Again, we are counting 6 months of a year in these numbers that has yet to actually happen.

Military in Iraq

The total number of military deaths that have taken place in Iraq since March of 2003 is 4,428 (4,114 of which have been U.S. soldiers). Even after having added the highest murder rate DC has seen in 50 years to the known total two times and adding in 6 months of crime totals to the DC count, the number of deaths experienced by servicemen and women in Iraq surpasses that of DC by slightly more than 2,650.

Since March of 2003, military deaths in Iraq have totaled 39% of the total homicides DC has experienced in the last 48 years.

Those U.S. Military wounded in Iraq since March of 2003 total 29,978. This number does not include servicemen and women from other countries, yet it still out-numbers the total of aggravated assaults in DC by more than 4,000.

One thing to be noted about all of these numbers: they are raw numbers, meaning they are not standardized by 100,000 to make for a fair comparison. We are comparing a city of approximately 581,530 with a group of U.S. troops that has never exceeded the initial number of 250,000 that were deployed in 2003. Currently there are around 185,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. This is about 32% of the total population of DC. In other words, a group 32% the size of DC has experienced significantly more death and violence than the citizens of the much larger city.

In order to truly understand the amount of instability and violence that is really occurring in Iraq (as if the number above were not startling enough), you also have to look at the violence endured by the Iraqi people.

Iraqi Citizens

The number of Iraqi deaths since the beginning of the war is much disputed. The Opinion Research Business has it listed at 1,033,000 as of August of 2007. Johns Hopkins has it listed at 654,965 excess deaths due to the war from 2003 through 2006. The World Health Organization has it listed at 400,000 excess deaths from 2003 through 2006, although they only list 151,000 of those as "violent deaths". To compare fairly, we need to standardize this number per 100,000 to compare it to DC's murder rate, as Iraq has a population of 29,267,000 and comparing raw death numbers between Iraq and DC would skew reality in Iraq’s favor.

In an attempt to be fair, we can take the middle number of the three proposed totals (654,965) and divide it by 3 (the number of years its death toll covers). That total of 218,321 leads us to a death rate of about 742.3 per year. That is to say, the average violent death rate of Iraqi citizens between the years of 2003-2006 is about 742 people per 100,000. Since 2003, the average murder rate has been 37.4. In the last 48 years, the highest murder rate DC has endured was 80.6 in the year 1991. This means that the Iraqi death rate between the years of 2003-2006 is 9.2 times higher than the highest DC murder rate of the last 48 years.

(A note about my analysis in comparison to the one used in the email. In all the numbers I saw, there were a few estimates that did tricky things with the death totals in Iraq. They somehow were able to qualify some deaths as "violent war" deaths and others as some other type of death. It seems to me that would be tough to do considering there are such glaring discrepancies in the total number of deaths to begin with. When one figure says over 1 million and the next says 50,000, it doesn't speak to very high levels of competence within the ranks of whoever is supposed to keep track of this stuff. It also makes me think that qualifying deaths would be a huge stretch given the obvious difficulty in just counting how many there actually were. That is why I tried to be fair in my estimation and I took the middle number of the three I was able to track down. Also, the numbers used in the email did not seem to speak to the violence among the soldiers fighting the war. It would be convenient to make your point if you left out the men and women on the front line.)

Emails like the one my step-dad received and people who provide the information used to create them can be dangerous. These types of false rumors can affect our fundamental understanding of two key issues in our day. First, the violence that is taking place in Iraq is horrific. Maybe it is better than it was before the war started, maybe it isn't. That is another issue entirely. The fact that unfathomable amounts of violence persists is the issue.

Second, false information like that in the aforementioned email distorts the fact of how lucky we are to live where we do. It also may affect how we see some of our fellow citizens, as some may view them in the same light they see insurgents running the streets with automatic weapons and deploying car bombs. The reality is, we don't deal with the type or frequency of violence many others do, and assuming we do is an egregious error with very real and deep consequences that distort our vital world views. These reports can lead to very severe commands with truly inappropriate repercussions.