(Wednesday update: I've written a follow-up to this post, examining the question of peacetime military fatalities in more detail, and addressing some of the uses to which the Colon piece has been put.)

Over at The Corner this morning, Jonah Goldberg linked to a New York Sun op-ed by Alicia Colon that sought to put American Iraq War combat deaths in "proper perspective." The "total military dead in the Iraq war between 2003 and this month stands at about 3,133," she wrote, compared with "4,417 [military] deaths in peacetime" in Clinton's first term.

These are startling figures, about which Goldberg said he'd "like to know more." So here you go, Jonah:

The first thing worth knowing about the numbers is that they compare total military deaths in Clinton's first term with Iraq War deaths under George W. Bush. All told, there were 5,076 US military fatalities between 2003 and 2005, not 3,133 between 2003 and early 2007.

The second thing worth knowing is that deaths of US military personnel dropped steadily over the course of the Clinton administration, as they had under Reagan and George HW Bush. In 1981, Reagan's first year in office, there were 2,380 US military deaths. In 2000, Clinton's last year, there were 758. The military got steadily better at protecting the lives of its servicemembers during Clinton's two terms in office, in other words, and Colon's use of his first-term numbers as a point of reference deliberately obscures that fact.

The third thing worth knowing is that it's not just combat deaths that rise in time of war. Military deaths by accident and illness doubled between 2000 and 2005, and homicides rose by a third. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have placed stresses on the military that don't appear in combat fatality figures.

And just now a commenter at The Corner, responding to Goldberg's request for data, said that "we're fighting this war with lower casualties than that expected from normal training accidents in a peacetime army." Setting aside the fact that the category of "casualties" includes injuries, of which our current wars have produced far more than the military would see in peacetime, that claim asks us to ignore the advances that our military has made in the last quarter-century in safeguarding the lives of its members.

The graphic at right shows the number of US military deaths per 100,000 personnel from 1981 to 2005. In it, we see that the death rate of American troops dropped steadily during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, and that by 2000 it had fallen to less than half of what it had been in 1981. That's a tremendous achievement, and a credit to the military.

But it's an achievement that's been undone by four years of war --- and it's an achievement that some are apparently willing to erase from memory in the cause of propaganda.

Update: Here's a single stat that sums up the above argument. In the final three calendar years of Clinton's administration, there were 2,381 US military fatalities. In the first three calendar years of the Iraq War there were 5,076.

That bears repeating, I think:

US military fatalities, 1998-2000: 2,381.
US military fatalities, 2003-2005: 5,076.

(The statistics I cite in this post can be found here, in the Excel spreadsheet entitled "U.S. Active Duty Military Deaths by Manner of Death: 1980 to 2005.")

Tags: essays, politics, the war