The casaulty rate and political feasibility of occupation.
CBS reports today that another 6 U.S. servicemen died on Thursday in Ramadi, a western Iraqi town, five by a roadside bomb and one by gunfire. That raises the official US casualty count to 1718 deaths, 1905 including UK and other coalition member deaths.
It's a morbid topic, but it's worth wondering at what kind of casualty rate does the occupation cease to be politically feasible in the US. The current of US politics -- on the op-ed pages, in the polls, online -- is, unsurprisingly, very sensitive to the nature of developments in Iraq. The immediate lead-up and aftermath of the January 30th national election -- remember all those wonderful images of the women with the purple fingers? -- led to a big groundswell of support among doubters and much crowing among the hawks. But as things have gone back toward chaos amid grim reports from the ground in and around the Sunni triangle, there has been a reversion to cynicism and recriminations among foes of the war and critics of occupation, and a resumption of madcap lying by Dick Cheney and Scott McLellan. Although Bush's poll numbers didn't closely track the situation in Iraq through the election season, American support for the war has tanked along with Bush's overall and WoT approval rating since the US election. Most polls are finding a majority of Americans saying the conflict was "not worth fighting". About 75% of Americans say the current casualty rate is "unacceptable". According to a recent Gallop poll, six in ten Americans want [corrected, earlier typo] to see the start of partial or total troop withdrawal from the region. The war isn't very exciting anymore. It's just a grind, and without the adrenalin, Americans are likely to become become less increasingly unwilling to tolerate casualties, or extended duties.
The Iraq Coalition Casualty Count is a good resource. Looking at average coaltion deaths by month, the January elections ended one of the hardest periods for the coalition, which experienced a daily death rate of about 3.8 soldiers per day, almost half the death rate that had prevailed during the actual war between March 20, 2003 and the fall of Baghdad in mid-April. In the three months following the January 31st election, coalition deaths fell to an average of about 1.7 per day, or about 0.9 deaths per thousand according to an article in McLeans Magazine. In May, renewed violence brought the average death rate back to 2.84. So far this month, factoring in the most recent deaths, it stands at 2.94, with all but two of the deaths in the numerator being American.
These numbers might change again, but what if they don't? Can the U.S. continue to sustain casualty rates of 3 soldiers per day without provoking a politically viable demand for immediate exit at home? (afterall, the drumbeats have already started in Congress, even among nervous Republicans, like North Carolina's Walter Jones who represents a strong military district and who actually voted for the IWR). There are currently around 140,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, a figure that has been roughly stable over the past two years. At the three-per-day rate, annual deaths in Iraq would account for 0.8% of the (rotating) US stock of soldiers in Iraq, and about 0.25% of the entire U.S. active-duty army. Add to that the fact that there are roughly 3.5 serious injuries for every death (casualties who don't return to combat within 72 hours) and you have an additional 3% of the the total force-size having their lives ruined or ended each year, or about 0.8% of the US active-duty army.
This is hardly WWI-level carnage, but unless Americans are enthusiastic about promoting Middle Eastern democracy and see Iraq as a way to do that (and its worth remembering, again, that Bush and his national security council are recent converts to the cause; that this wasn't why Bush was originally elected; and it's not how the war was originally sold), it does make the ongoing occupation look politically very difficult. In Vietnam, American deaths eventually totalled about 11% of the force as it stood at its peak of just under 550,000 troops in 1968, and the war wreaked political havoc at home. Granted, the sin of sending young men off to slaughter to service the Big Red Scare was worse -- and more deserving of outrage -- because of the draft and its inequtities than it should be under a (technically) all-volunteer force. (On the other hand, that was also an age in which noblesse-oblige argubably still existed to a measurable extent among the hawks in power as well as the doves.) More recently, US participation in ongoing Balkan peacekeeping was politically possible largely because of the small numbers of troops involved, under 5000 in Bosnia-Herzegovenia and Kosovo by the early '00s.
What about the prospects for Iraq itself? Without getting into any political analysis -- like what effect the beginning of troop withdrawal would have on the insurgency -- the data from Iraq Body Count (though it looks to be about two weeks out of date right now), suggests that Iraq has experienced a civilian violent death-rate of about 23 per day since the "end of major combat operations" and the start of the occupation phase on May 1st, 2003; those numbers are roughly comparable to, or maybe a bit lower than, the numbers reported by Juan Cole and others for recent carnage. The ICCC also reports that, since the beginning of 2005, about 1,000 Iraq security and police personnel have been killed, bringing the average closer to around 28 Iraqis killed due to the occupation and/or guerilla conflict daily. In a country of just under 26 million people, those figures, if they prove to be representative of what's ahead, suggest that about four percent of one percent (0.04%)of Iraqis will be dying in violent conflict annually, with the casualty rate probably well over one in a thousand once serious injuries are added into the numerator.
Again, those numbers are tiny compared to the carnage going on in civil and inter-tribal wars in various parts of Africa. But they're probably pretty close to the borderline of what might be sustainable and still allow the possibility of maintaining the trappings, and functioning government, of civil society (which involves things like keeping people like Ahmed Chalabi from assuming too much power.) A poll of Iraqis taken last year suggests that a majority of Shiites and a large majority of Kurds don't perceive life in Iraq to be "unpredictable and dangerous", though it's unclear if the poll concluded before or after the upswing in violence that dominated the three months leading up to the January 30th election.
Nevertheless, at the risk of sounding hopelessly pedantic, both the coalition and Iraqi death rate look plausibly permanent, various US military figures having remarked that insurgencies of this type can last up to ten years. And the Iraqi violent death rate looks to be about an order of magnitude above the occupation violent death rate, while the Iraqi population is two orders of magnitude larger than the size of the occupying army. So at least at first pass, Iraqi civil society looks a lot more sustainable than does the ongoing American military presence in Iraq, especially given Americans voters' potential to vote the War Party out of Congress in a mere 17 months. Expect to hear more from Walter Jones in the weeks to come.
Update: Because I wrote this late at night and then had to be somewhere in the morning, I posted this entry way too soon. Consequently, it contained a bunch of real groaning errors, including math errors, which I hope I've now corrected. I assume nobody is reading this blog but if they are, I apologize for the sloppiness.
Props also to this excellent post on roughly the same topic from Lies.com.
It's a morbid topic, but it's worth wondering at what kind of casualty rate does the occupation cease to be politically feasible in the US. The current of US politics -- on the op-ed pages, in the polls, online -- is, unsurprisingly, very sensitive to the nature of developments in Iraq. The immediate lead-up and aftermath of the January 30th national election -- remember all those wonderful images of the women with the purple fingers? -- led to a big groundswell of support among doubters and much crowing among the hawks. But as things have gone back toward chaos amid grim reports from the ground in and around the Sunni triangle, there has been a reversion to cynicism and recriminations among foes of the war and critics of occupation, and a resumption of madcap lying by Dick Cheney and Scott McLellan. Although Bush's poll numbers didn't closely track the situation in Iraq through the election season, American support for the war has tanked along with Bush's overall and WoT approval rating since the US election. Most polls are finding a majority of Americans saying the conflict was "not worth fighting". About 75% of Americans say the current casualty rate is "unacceptable". According to a recent Gallop poll, six in ten Americans want [corrected, earlier typo] to see the start of partial or total troop withdrawal from the region. The war isn't very exciting anymore. It's just a grind, and without the adrenalin, Americans are likely to become become less increasingly unwilling to tolerate casualties, or extended duties.
The Iraq Coalition Casualty Count is a good resource. Looking at average coaltion deaths by month, the January elections ended one of the hardest periods for the coalition, which experienced a daily death rate of about 3.8 soldiers per day, almost half the death rate that had prevailed during the actual war between March 20, 2003 and the fall of Baghdad in mid-April. In the three months following the January 31st election, coalition deaths fell to an average of about 1.7 per day, or about 0.9 deaths per thousand according to an article in McLeans Magazine. In May, renewed violence brought the average death rate back to 2.84. So far this month, factoring in the most recent deaths, it stands at 2.94, with all but two of the deaths in the numerator being American.
These numbers might change again, but what if they don't? Can the U.S. continue to sustain casualty rates of 3 soldiers per day without provoking a politically viable demand for immediate exit at home? (afterall, the drumbeats have already started in Congress, even among nervous Republicans, like North Carolina's Walter Jones who represents a strong military district and who actually voted for the IWR). There are currently around 140,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, a figure that has been roughly stable over the past two years. At the three-per-day rate, annual deaths in Iraq would account for 0.8% of the (rotating) US stock of soldiers in Iraq, and about 0.25% of the entire U.S. active-duty army. Add to that the fact that there are roughly 3.5 serious injuries for every death (casualties who don't return to combat within 72 hours) and you have an additional 3% of the the total force-size having their lives ruined or ended each year, or about 0.8% of the US active-duty army.
This is hardly WWI-level carnage, but unless Americans are enthusiastic about promoting Middle Eastern democracy and see Iraq as a way to do that (and its worth remembering, again, that Bush and his national security council are recent converts to the cause; that this wasn't why Bush was originally elected; and it's not how the war was originally sold), it does make the ongoing occupation look politically very difficult. In Vietnam, American deaths eventually totalled about 11% of the force as it stood at its peak of just under 550,000 troops in 1968, and the war wreaked political havoc at home. Granted, the sin of sending young men off to slaughter to service the Big Red Scare was worse -- and more deserving of outrage -- because of the draft and its inequtities than it should be under a (technically) all-volunteer force. (On the other hand, that was also an age in which noblesse-oblige argubably still existed to a measurable extent among the hawks in power as well as the doves.) More recently, US participation in ongoing Balkan peacekeeping was politically possible largely because of the small numbers of troops involved, under 5000 in Bosnia-Herzegovenia and Kosovo by the early '00s.
What about the prospects for Iraq itself? Without getting into any political analysis -- like what effect the beginning of troop withdrawal would have on the insurgency -- the data from Iraq Body Count (though it looks to be about two weeks out of date right now), suggests that Iraq has experienced a civilian violent death-rate of about 23 per day since the "end of major combat operations" and the start of the occupation phase on May 1st, 2003; those numbers are roughly comparable to, or maybe a bit lower than, the numbers reported by Juan Cole and others for recent carnage. The ICCC also reports that, since the beginning of 2005, about 1,000 Iraq security and police personnel have been killed, bringing the average closer to around 28 Iraqis killed due to the occupation and/or guerilla conflict daily. In a country of just under 26 million people, those figures, if they prove to be representative of what's ahead, suggest that about four percent of one percent (0.04%)of Iraqis will be dying in violent conflict annually, with the casualty rate probably well over one in a thousand once serious injuries are added into the numerator.
Again, those numbers are tiny compared to the carnage going on in civil and inter-tribal wars in various parts of Africa. But they're probably pretty close to the borderline of what might be sustainable and still allow the possibility of maintaining the trappings, and functioning government, of civil society (which involves things like keeping people like Ahmed Chalabi from assuming too much power.) A poll of Iraqis taken last year suggests that a majority of Shiites and a large majority of Kurds don't perceive life in Iraq to be "unpredictable and dangerous", though it's unclear if the poll concluded before or after the upswing in violence that dominated the three months leading up to the January 30th election.
Nevertheless, at the risk of sounding hopelessly pedantic, both the coalition and Iraqi death rate look plausibly permanent, various US military figures having remarked that insurgencies of this type can last up to ten years. And the Iraqi violent death rate looks to be about an order of magnitude above the occupation violent death rate, while the Iraqi population is two orders of magnitude larger than the size of the occupying army. So at least at first pass, Iraqi civil society looks a lot more sustainable than does the ongoing American military presence in Iraq, especially given Americans voters' potential to vote the War Party out of Congress in a mere 17 months. Expect to hear more from Walter Jones in the weeks to come.
Update: Because I wrote this late at night and then had to be somewhere in the morning, I posted this entry way too soon. Consequently, it contained a bunch of real groaning errors, including math errors, which I hope I've now corrected. I assume nobody is reading this blog but if they are, I apologize for the sloppiness.
Props also to this excellent post on roughly the same topic from Lies.com.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home