At Last, Some Perspective

I was heartened to see this story from Reuters today, titled "FactBox: Military and Civilian Deaths in Iraq." It's a nice counterpoint to the constant news ticker with the number of US military deaths, creeping upward by a few bodies per day and now in the low 4,000s... if you add in deaths of coalition forces from other countries, the number jumps by a paltry few hundred.

Hard to swallow of course, if like me you're in a military family, but on the other hand those in uniform sign up for the posssibility of being killed, get paid for it, are legitimate targets, and are dying at lower rates than most wars in US history.

If you bar-graph this against the average of conservative estimates of civilian deaths so far (that is, deaths of innocent individuals who shouldn't be hit and didn't sign up for the risk), it looks something like this.


I'd really, really like to see more coverage of this discrepancy in the US media. Not sob stories of Iraqi families, but the sheer numbers, a regular day-by-day ticker. Could provide some ongoing perspective.