Putting Iraq into perspective

I got one of those emails that gets circled around. Normally, I give little credence to what is said in those emails - what, with no confirmable source and all - but this one stuck with me. I decided to do some independent research and, lo and behold, there is some validity to what it said.

According to the FBI, Washington DC is getting safer. As recently as 2000, there were 1,508 violent crimes per 100,000 residents. However, during the first Clinton administration that rate was almost twice as high - up to 2,922 violent crimes per 100,000 residents.

According to the Pentagon, as of this weekend there were 13,190 US casualties (killed or wounded) in Iraq. We have averaged roughly 160,000 US troops in Iraq since April, 2003 - two and a quarter years. That means we have about 360,000 man-years recorded by our servicemen and women in country. This works out to a violent crime rate of 3,664 per 100,000. This is 25% more dangerous than our nation's capitol was just a decade ago.

Keep in mind, Washington, DC, like many other US cities, has many areas in which the crime rate is significantly lower. This means that it has many neighborhoods where the rate is much, much higher. Keep in mind that our troops on the ground in Iraq are in the most dangerous parts all the time. Also, casualty counts include accidents, which means that some of these soldiers might have been wounded or killed in training back home had the war not occurred.

We had a war, followed up by an occupation in Terror-Central. Every Tom, Dick, and Achmed who has a bone to pick with Uncle "Great Satan" Sam is strapping on a boom-vest or rigging up a roadside greeting. The terrorists, unfortunately, have answered our Commander in Chief's encouraging call to "bring it on" and our troops, unfortunately, have had to bear the brunt of it. Yet this "quagmire," as some of the leftists I frequently read in the New York Times like to call Iraq, is actually no more dangerous to our troops than many parts of the United States are (or have been recently) to the people who live there.

When you factor in crimes against tourists or visitors, the rates go up even more. In other words, statistically speaking, for the three hours one night this year that I, suburbanite minivan-driving accountant that I was, did tax work in Camden, I was in as much danger as any one of our troops in Iraq. This is the same for any student of Penn, Drexel, NYU, John Hopkins, UCLA, or any number of big-city universities across the country who wanders a few blocks off campus. When my fraternity did service projects in West Philly, North Philly, and other places we were armed with mops and scrub brushes. The Woman on the Verge, who has a confessions blog on blogger, lived by herself in one of those neighborhoods. Ms N grew up in another place that was not much safer than Baghdad.

The critics are more than happy to point out that the US Army is recruiting heavily from the poor and uneducated, which means that the already less fortunate are more likely to be the ones in harm's way. The irony is that there are a number of soldiers in Iraq right now who are actually safer there than their family members back home. Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Detroit, Houston, San Francisco, Dallas, Miami, and Chicago are amongst the US cities that have areas that are more dangerous to their residents that Iraq is to our soldiers.

I think that our invasion of Iraq - remember, Sodom Insane had everybody, including the Democrats, France, Germany, and Iraqis convinced that he had weapons of mass destruction stashed away somewhere - was justifiable. I have no problem that we are there. I do have a problem with the way things were handled. Crummy Rummy was just on TV this weekend saying that the low troop count was a result of the generals on the ground saying they didn't want any more soldiers, yet he overlooked the fact that he and Shrub got rid of the generals who contended that there should be more troops. I think that the effort to win hearts and minds was overlooked and underfunded and that, more than anything else, has led to the increase in terrorist attacks against our troops. The people in charge ignored those who had thought out probable outcomes to our actions, and as a result many of the unfortunate predictions came true. That has increased the costs of the invasion in terms of dollars and lives. Were our government a corporation, the CEO and several top executives would have been fired over these mistakes - mainly because of the drop in the stock price.

Yet the dangers caused by Georgie the Kid and Dopey Don (my apologies to Congressman Don Young, who has held this nickname for much of his time representing Alaska in the House), not to mention the Big Dick, are matched by the dangers caused by the media whores and blogophiles who like to stretch the truth to get ratings or readers. 3,664 per 100,000. That means that for every 100 men and women we send over for a year, 96 come back unscathed. High schools across the country yearn for numbers that good.