Here, in the comment immediately above, Rise Against says, “Let’s not forget either, nonbody was dying in Iraq before the invasion.” Hello! Lots of people were dying, and I don’t mean of natural causes. Saddam Hussein was a vicious dictator who held onto power by any means necessary. There were lots of political prisoners, with the associated tortures and killings. Because of the embargo and oil-for-food program, most people were dependent on the government to avoid starvation. The government did its best to see that food went to government supporters and not to those who couldn’t be counted on.

Saying no one was dying in Iraq before the invasion is as stupid as saying that no one is dying in Darfur today.

Would London have been bombed this morning if the Iraq war was never started? What if everyone had just focused on hunting Al-Qaeda, you remember them, the people who attacked the US? What was that guy’s name again? Is he still out there? How long has it been? Any closer to him yet?

He also often trots out his purported support of marriage rights for gay people as evidence of his liberal cred. Heh. If his support of the Iraq war were as soft and mushy as his support for gay marriage, he would have called himself a fascist terrorist-lover on his own site ages ago. Mostly he’s fond of writing about the “backlash” against gay people over this issue, and how the idea of two men getting married is “unprecedented in human history.” Oh, and then there’s the whole “AIDS is caused by AIDS drugs and poppers” thing. Let’s just say he won’t be speaking at any PFLAG meetings in the near future.

It’s obviously a very sore subject with me and I would do better to avoid addressing it. But its hard to let it go when I see comments that mischaracterize the reasons why “we” turn an uncritical eye to certain cilivian deaths.

“This insurgency is not nearly as capable as everyone thinks it is. In fact, the insurgents want you to think they are more powerful than they are.”

Testing the George Casey theory, let’s take a look at Iraq by the numbers:

Number of U.S. troops in Iraq — 135,000;

Number of coalition troops in Iraq — 23,250;

Number of Iraqi security forces — 168,581;

Number of insurgents & militants — 16,000;

The cost of losing an insurgent (but not guerilla) war when your side has 326,831 soldiers and the other side has just 16,000: Priceless, er, um I mean $180,000,000,000.00.

But apparently, these means that the resisters are in their “last throes”, which according to Rumsfeld, may only last 12 years. Whew, I feel much better.

Now, you could argue that the trend is not statistically significant (I get a p-value of .08, though, which is going to make that argument a pretty difficult one). Or you could say that regardless of the trend in US deaths, there are other reasons to believe we are winning against the insurgency. But when you say that the trend in US deaths is actually downward, you’re wrong. The numbers don’t show that. They show the opposite.

“Massaging” might be too strong a term for what you’re doing; it implies that you’re misstating the evidence on purpose. I think it’s just as likely that you just aren’t very sophisticated about statistics and numerical analysis, and so are letting an unconcsious confirmation bias lead you to misinterpret what you see.

Furthermore, it is simply common sense to separate out the invasion force from the occupation force. And as for my “really whacky” graph–it is certainly not “apples and oranges,” it is based entirely on the four time periods clearly defined in the same Iraqi Coalition Casualties site. And it is a simple matter of fact that if you go by their site, and their own measurements as publish them, the number of combat deaths has NOT been going up. Simply go right to this page: http://icasualties.org/oif/ — and have a look. I did not define these periods, they did. And the numbers right on that site clearly show that the average daily death toll is down, not up. However, I didn’t jump on that because I think it’s too soon to assume that will still be the case, which is why I tried to plot an average between the four defined time periods and, while treating those separately, to see if a trend could emerge.

Your numbers would be more honest I think if you only counted combat deaths and not all deaths, since “all deaths” includes heart attacks, infections, falls, traffic accidents, and other such things. Otherwise I have no real problem with your charts at all. I merely note that they show the same thing as mine do, and the same thing the http://icasualties.org/oif/ site does–combat deaths aren’t going up.

Yes, the fascist insurgency that so many on the left sympathize with is growing more violent and more clever. They’re also being dealt with more and more by the Iraqis themselves. My own position on this is that by any rational or objective measure, the Iraq operation is already an incredible success, militarily speaking–and of course, a great and noble moral cause. This obviously may bias my interpretation, just as your own opposition to the cause may bias yours, but in no case did I intentionally skew any numbers or try to “massage” any data or pretty anything up.

Oh, by the way, I don’t consider myself a conservative. I get called one by folks like you simply because I support the liberation of Iraq. So even though I’m for national health insurance, medical marijuana, gay marriage, having government pay for people’s college educations, and so on, I’m supposedly a “right winger.” That’s just the nature of modern politics I guess, but oh well.

In any case it’s clear to me that both our analyses show the same thing: no discernible long-term trend in combat deaths except that it’s been down recently.