Read this.

It's by a mother in Iraq, a woman whose daughter is a university student in Baghdad.

The city's unversities have been targets of ongoing violence, so for the last semester classes have been held at random, ever-changing times. Students have been shuffled from one campus to another.

Female students have regularly been abducted from one of the campuses her daughter has been attending, and then raped and murdered. At the gates of another, a young man was pushed from a car in handcuffs and shot. When students rushed to help him, snipers opened fire from nearby rooftops.

Finally this woman's daughter gave up on classes altogether and started studying alone at home. But today was the start of the mid-term exam period, and she had to go back. The city's students are, in this mother's words, "sitting ducks" for the next week and a half.

It's evening now in Baghdad, and this woman's daughter has called her and told her she made it home safely.

But dozens of other parents won't get that call tonight. The AP is reporting that a bomb was set off at an annex campus of his daughter's college today. More than forty people were killed, most of them students.

Here's how she closed his post, this mother, before she knew about today's bomb:

She is mad to continue.
I am mad to let her.

(Thanks to Talking Points Memo for the heads-up.)

Edit: Because I identified so closely with this woman, and because her screenname struck my ears as masculine, I initially assumed she was a man. This morning she posted again and a third-person reference to herself made it clear that she's in fact a woman.

Tags: the war

In a post on the Alicia Colon op-ed I mentioned yesterday, Andrew Sullivan wonders what caused all the peacetime deaths Colon is talking about. It's a question I've seen asked elsewhere, and one that's relevant to the ways the Colon piece is being spun.

The short answer is that most of them were accidents, and that most of the rest were due to illness or suicide. Between 1980 and 2005, 55% of American military deaths were accidental, 18% were related to illness, and 14% were self-inflicted. Only 6% were due to hostile action or terrorist attack.

The military has long been a dangerous occupation, even in peacetime. More than ten thousand American servicepeople died in accidents during the Reagan administration.

As I said yesterday, though, the military made great strides in the 1980s and 1990s in reducing these risks. They were particularly successful in lowering the accident rate --- there were 1,524 deaths due to accident in the American military in 1981, and just 398 in 2000.

A lot of conservatives are adopting the line that the deaths from the Iraq War are comparable to what we'd see in peacetime, and in one sense they're correct --- a generation ago, we did see these kind of mortality figures in the peacetime armed forces. But those mortality rates weren't acceptable then, and the military worked hard to bring them down.

The military is still a dangerous occupation, even in peacetime. But --- and I can hardly believe I have to say this --- war is more dangerous than peace. In 2000, 758 American servicemembers died. In 2005, 1,951 American servicemembers died. Those aren't comparable figures. They represent twelve hundred young Americans whose families are grieving them today. (And the statistics don't speak to those who were grievously injured that year, or to the local dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Do those twelve hundred dead, or the twelve hundred before them, or the twelve hundred after, mean that this war is not worth fighting? No. Some wars are worth fighting at high human cost, and others are not even if the cost is low. But these lives are lives lost because of this war, and that loss should not be obfuscated or ignored, least of all by those who demanded the war and those who demand that it continue.

Tags: essays, the war

(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

From The Hill:

At a private reception held at the White House with newly elected lawmakers shortly after the election, Bush asked [Virginia Senator-elect James] Webb how his son, a Marine lance corporal serving in Iraq, was doing.

Webb responded that he really wanted to see his son brought back home, said a person who heard about the exchange from Webb.

“I didn’t ask you that, I asked how he’s doing,” Bush retorted, according to the source.

Webb confessed that he was so angered by this that he was tempted to slug the commander-in-chief.

Just wow.

Update: My buddy Steven notes in comments that Bush and Webb both seem "trapped in their roles" in this exchange. He suggests that Webb might better have said something like, "I know you don't want to hear this, but he shouldn't be there at all. But, he's doing well, thank you for asking," when Bush asked him the question.

Which reminds me. I mentioned in an update last night that the Washington Post confirmed the Hill story, but I didn't note that their version of the exchange is subtly but significantly different. Where The Hill's paraphrased Webb's response, the Post quoted it: "I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President."

I'm fascinated by that "them." If it's accurate, I understand Bush's response a little better. It reads like he was maybe trying clumsily to talk to Webb father to father, and was maybe blindsided by what he saw as an aggressively political reply. And there's a third possibility, too --- maybe Webb said "I'd like to get him out of Iraq," and Bush heard "get 'em out of Iraq." In which case Bush's rejoinder and Webb's impulse to sock him on the jaw both feel very human.

Tags: politics, the war, weirdness