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How Does Iraq Rate?

In her New York Sun column, Alicia Colon cites some interesting figures about Iraq, offered by Rep. Steve King of Iowa:

According to Mr. King, the violent death rate in Iraq is 25.71 per 100,000. That may sound high, but not when you compare it to places like Colombia (61.7), South Africa (49.6), Jamaica (32.4), and Venezuela (31.6). How about the violent death rates in American cities? New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina was 53.1. FBI statistics for 2004-05 have Washington at 45.9, Baltimore at 37.7, and Atlanta at 34.9.

Rush Limbaugh also picked this up, though the item on his Web site has gone behind the subscription wall. We thought it sounded too good to be true, and we were right. We called Rep. King's office and asked for the sources of the figures. Here they are:

* The Iraq rate is a ratio of civilian death figures, taken from this site, to population, taken from this site. According to King aide Summer Johnson, the number is 27.51; two digits were transposed in Colon's column. (We used the figure of 8,745 civilian deaths since April 28, 2005, given on this page, annualized it to 8,312, and came up with 31.03 per 100,000 per year--a higher rate but within the same general range.)

* The figures for other countries are homicide rates, taken from this page, which is based on U.N. reports that can be found here.

* The figures for U.S. cities also are homicide rates, taken from this chart.

The figure for Iraq, then, is not the "violent death rate"; it is only the rate of violent death from war. (The equivalent figure for the other countries and cities presumably would be zero.) To arrive at a "violent death rate" for Iraq, we would to add in the civil homicide rate.

The most recent such figures we could find from Iraq are on page 777 of this PDF document, which says that between 1990 and 1994, the annual homicide rate was between 5.66 and 7.28 per 100,000. These figures don't tell us much, though, since (a) in those days Iraq had a criminal regime, and criminal regimes are not in the habit of accounting for their own crimes, and (b) the greater freedom in Iraq since 2003 might well have affected the rate of civil homicide.

Furthermore, even if war deaths in Iraq vs. civil homicides elsewhere were a valid comparison, the King figures are a lowball estimate of the former. That's because the numerator--the number of Iraqi "civilian" deaths--excludes soldiers and policemen. But civil homicide rates do include policemen and soldiers murdered in the line of duty--as several hundred of them were on 9/11.

In addition, the comparison with U.S. cities poses a problem of scale. Just as some municipalities here have high concentrations of crime, Baghdad and some other Iraqi cities have high concentrations of military, guerrilla and terrorist activity. A comparison of Baghdad with Los Angeles or a similarly sprawling U.S. city would be more enlightening than a comparison of Iraq as a whole with cities of well under a million people.

We of course sympathize with the broader point King and Colon are making. But it's important to be careful with numbers. Without meaning to, they have painted a misleadingly Pollyannaish picture of Iraq, and that's the wrong way to counter the liberal media's misleadingly Cassandrian one.

-- BEST OF THE WEB, 5/18/06

-- For Links: http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110008392