Casualty Trends: Why They Matter And Why They Don't

With American forces claiming continued progress as military deaths continue to fall, the folks over at Kos have been accepting a different narrative: while the Americans say that civilian casualties are down again, AFP maintains that the Iraqi ministries have numbers that say more civilians were killed this month than last month. Kos's diarists have been taking this to mean that the Americans are lying, and that the progress at large is completely fictional (which they claimed before the discrepancy anyway).

Long story short, what we have here is very simple: the Iraqi ministries came up with different numbers that the Department of Defense in regards to civilian and ISF casualties. According to the AFP article, the Iraqi ministries of Defense, Health, and Interior counted 887 ISF or civilian deaths this month, up from 840 from September, but still down from 1770 in August.

According to Icasualties.org, which matches US DOD data very closely, there were 679 ISF/civilian casualties in October, down from 848 in September and down from 1674 in August. Side by side, the last 3 months look like this:


It would seem obvious that in light of the massive improvement upon August that's been bilaterally reported, the more recent, relatively small divergence may not be significant. Even assuming that it is (which no responsible statistician would do), it doesn't indicate any trend as yet, as the left has been so quick to point out every day for the last 5 months when casualties were declining.

Ultimately, statistics is very much like psychology: all one can do is monitor behavior, and imply a cause for it. Unless we are willing to take an exceptionally detailed and unprecedentedly involved look at the underlying cultural, social, economic, epistemological, and military causes for the numbers, we won't know with any degree of certainty what the numbers really mean. However, there are a number of simple reasons that may explain the difference in reporting.

The reason that the left clings to immediately is a difference in the definition of what constitutes a civilian. One Kos blogger claims that any dead male is counted as a terrorist by the Americans; if that were true, the level of terrorist-on-terrorist violence being reported would be stunningly high. Its important to remember that the vast majority of civilians who die violently in Iraq are dying at the hands of insurgents. Since that's the case, such obfuscation by the Americans is unnecessary. And according to FM 3-24, Gen. Petraeus would not approve of it anyway.

While it may be politically expedient to blame all the violence on the American invasion as an inciting incident, the fact of the matter is that insurgents and terrorists explicitly target civilians, and are responsible first-hand for the majority of dead innocents. A cursory glance at reports from iraqbodycount.org (who engages in the aforementioned political expedience) backs this statement up.

A more likely reason for the count discrepancy is the fact that, in any given month, more people die than are counted. A count only captures a percentage of the real casualty rate, and a higher count only means that one party managed to count a higher percentage of the actual, and what percentage that is will likely never be known. So again, its hard to blame Defense or MoI for any obfuscation, when nobody will likely ever know what the real number for any given month is.

After that ridiculous slogging through numbers to no conclusion whatsoever, we get to something more useful: despite reporting slightly higher numbers (a difference of 47 from September), the Iraqi Minister for Security claimed progress:

"Again on Thursday, Iraq's minister for security, Shirwan al-Waili, insisted that the situation was improving in Baghdad and other areas.

'Because of the security plan, the violence has reduced. Baghdad is much safer,' Waili told state television."

And then, in the same AFP article, we have Lt. Gen. Odierno claiming this:

"'Improvised explosive device attacks, the extremists' preferred method of terror, have also been reduced, down well over 60 percent in the past four months, with notably reduced lethality,' he said"

Which brings an interesting and rarely-mentioned metric to mind: what does the intent of the insurgency look like over time? Its one thing to count bodies, but it doesn't tell you much of anything about what the insurgency has been trying to do and what they've been succeeding in doing. Casualties dropping is not the same as the insurgency floundering. If attacks have been decreasing, it could mean a whole number of different things, all of which point to progress very explicitly, in a way that a body count simply can't.

It's a good thing people like Lt. Gen. Odierno and Gen. Petraeus know these things and keep track of them. This is why they run the military and the folks at Kos run a diary (by the way, those are volunteers, not "conscripts" as Kos claims).