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Afghanistan and Iraq, November 2011

December 2nd, 2011 at 11:19 pm by Dr. Drang

I’ve been derelict with these posts the past few months, and the news has generally been good. After a really bad August, the US and coalition military deaths in Afghanistan have gone down considerably.

Afghanistan, November 2011

And Iraq is about where it’s been for the past year or two.

Iraq, November 2011

We will, in theory, be out of Iraq at the end of this month. I suppose that’ll mean the end of this chart, after far more years than I ever expected to maintain it.

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Post #1695 | 3 Comments

3 Responses to “Afghanistan and Iraq, November 2011”

  1. Lri says:
    December 3rd, 2011 at 1:34 am

    I know you’re just making graphs of two data sets, but the focus these posts have on coalition deaths still makes them appear infuriatingly biased.

    The number of non-coalition deaths is multiple times as tragic. The worldwide economic cost of the wars is even more significant.

  2. Dr. Drang says:
    December 3rd, 2011 at 8:47 am

    I started these posts many years ago because I thought the charts presented at icasualties.org were poorly done to the point of being misleading. My charts were meant to be a correction. (They have improved their charts considerably since then.)

    As time went on, the posts transformed into a sort of monthly complaint about how the human cost of the war was given short shrift in the US news media.

    None of the this is meant to dismiss your main complaint that the charts are too US-centric. I don’t disagree, but there are two reasons for that:

    1. I’ve found no accepted sources for non-coalition casualties. I know estimates have been published, but every estimate seems to be weighted according to the political views of the estimator. I don’t want to choose from among them.
    2. I am old enough to remember when the daily body counts from the Vietnam War were presented on the nightly news. It was like a football score and always gave the sense that the US was winning. I don’t want my posts to get into an “us vs. them” comparison that would leave the same impression. I want my mostly US readers to think about (one of) the costs we are paying for our decisions to start and extent these wars.

  3. Ravi says:
    December 8th, 2011 at 2:04 pm

    Regarding 1, i.e non-coalition casualties, maybe you could make a graph from multiple sources and see if there is a trend? It would be interesting to see how the political views of the estimator influence their estimates