Originally posted by bj229r
This interested me...can anyone verify this one way or the other?
quote:
Iraq Less Violent than Washington, D.C.
Despite media coverage purporting to show that escalating violence in Iraq has the country spiraling out of control, civilian death statistics complied by Rep. Steve King, R-IA, indicate that Iraq actually has a lower civilian violent death rate than Washington, D.C.
Appearing with Westwood One radio host Monica Crowley on Saturday, King said that the incessantly negative coverage of the Iraq war prompted him to research the actual death numbers.
"I began to ask myself the question, if you were a civilian in Iraq, how could you tolerate that level of violence," he said. "What really is the level of violence?"
Using Pentagon statistics cross-checked with independent research, King said he came up with an annualized Iraqi civilian death rate of 27.51 per 100,000.
"It's 45 violent deaths per 100,000 in Washington, D.C.," King told Crowley.
.......
The American city with the highest civilian death rate was New Orleans before Katrina - with a staggering 53.1 deaths per 100,000 - almost twice the death rate in Iraq.
endquote
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/5/29/132706.shtml?s=ic
Great thing about statistics, you can twist them to mean many things.
First, I don't think there is any way for an accurate accounting of the dead in Baghdad, or Iraq as a whole. There are many shallow graves and bodies lying open in the desert. When working the Abu Nuwas city park site, dead bodies floated down the river or washed up on the riverbank most days. This was two years ago. Most were revenge killings and kidnapping victims ...and I was there before the Golden Mosque was bombed and reprisal killings became so popular between Shia and Sunni. Families don't always take their dead to the hospitals or morgues..... the families and neighbors and clans take care of things themselves. Only figures come from the Pentagon and the various hospitals. Pentagon obviously wants to downplay those figures. Hospitals give widely conflicting numbers. I've never heard a report of how many wounded die days after a bombing event to be added to the number of dead. What about those taken out of the city into the desert and executed? Do they get added to official counts for the city? You're not getting a complete count by any means with the situation the way it is in Iraq.
By "my math", which is to say, trying to guestimate those deaths that are not reported in the daily papers...to include the "average crimes" and not just attacks that rate news coverage....with an average of 30 dying a day in Baghdad through bombings, shootings, revenge killings, death squads, hijackings, and widespread kidnappings for ransom that didn't happen before we took over (we fired all the Iraqi soldiers when we took over; many that didn't join the insurgency, entered organized crime ---- theft, kidnappings, extortion, black market, the whole bit....). BTW, I personally think 30 a day is a low figure for the greater Baghdad area...... that's over 10,000 a year.... for a city population of over 6 million, so around 180 per 100,000 per year. If I'm over by half, and an average of 15 a day is considered, that's still 90 per 100K.
Then look at the level of violence. How many bodies float down the Potomac every day? How many markets get bombed? How many death squads running around and is there an estimate on the number of shallow graves in the surrounding area of Washington D.C.? Parents are afraid to allow children go to school in some Baghdad neighborhoods from the number of kidnappings, how often does that happen in D.C.? How many commuters in Washington have to worry about the car next to them exploding, or approaching an armed checkpoint a little too fast and having soldiers open fire on their car?
This was just such a bizarre story. I seriously doubt that anyone that has actually been to Baghdad could compare the level of violence there to any U.S. city.
