Fact-Finding, Fact-Losing

McCain recently criticized Obama for reiterating his intention to get American troops out of Iraq within eighteen months if he's elected even though Obama hasn't yet made his upcoming fact-finding trip to Iraq.

“In my experience," McCain said, "fact-finding missions usually work best the other way around: First you assess the facts on the ground, then you present a new strategy."

I'm not sure it's a fair accusation in this case, but it's a reasonable one. Policy decisions should always be inspired by aspiration but shaped by information. And even more important than finding facts is really thinking them through--making sure that they're as reliable, complete, and contexualized as possible. I've got no problem with McCain making this critique of Obama's stance. It rings a little hollow since I don't think there's any facts McCain could find that would make him change his policy, but that's a another story.

What I do object to is that since learning in 2000 just how ruthless and dishonest Bush and his retinue can be, McCain seems to have developed Stockholm syndrome for his captors in the creep wing of the GOP. In the past 5 years in Iraq, the US government has spent about a trillion dollars that could have been used at home (hello, mortgage crisis, hello tanking dollar), the US military has lost 4,121 soldiers, and (conservatively) 90,000 Iraqis have been killed.

This all happened to eliminate the threat of weapons of mass destruction that were long gone and to take out al Qaeda loyalists who weren't yet there. Before the invasion, those facts had been found. But then the White House had them lost. McCain isn't dumb. He knows that. But he's been mute on it for five years, and he'll be mute for another five months at least. If it's worth criticizing Obama for not making military decisions in terms of the best available information, surely it's worth criticizing the Bush administration-- Oh, never mind. We know what's going on.

Anyway, the good news in all this is that during the Bush administration, human life hasn't become worth less just figuratively. It's now literally worth less. 11.5% less, to be precise. In 2003, the EPA set the value of human life at $7.8 million dollars in deciding whether certain environmental pollution regulations saved enough life-dollars to be worth the regulation-dollars spent on them. Since then, the figure has dropped to $6.9 million.

Putting the dead from the Iraq war at 94,121 and setting aside deaths due to opportunity costs, the new EPA figure means that those who died in the Iraq war are only worth $649 billion. So it turns out that losing those facts about Iraq was only about a $1.65-trillion mistake rather than a $1.73-trillion mistake. Nice.

Understanding the Corpses

Every blogger runs the risk of being a pontificating twit, a prattling narcissist, or some affiliated variety of prat. My hunch is that I'm particularly liable to lapse into insensitive dickery. And so I'm having a very hard time writing this post because I'm almost positive it'll come out wrong. But I still feel like what I have to say today is worth saying if I can say it right.

And I want to say that I think we're paying too much attention to the Virginia Tech shootings. Now, I'm not saying that it isn't a big story or that we shouldn't pay attention to it. Thirty-two people murdered is overwhelming. That sort of death, its pointless brutality, should impress itself on our thoughts. On the day all this was happening, I happened to be talking to a current Virginia Tech visiting Chicago. Maybe she would have been killed if she'd still been in Blacksburg. Maybe friends of hers died. Surely friends of her friends were gunned down for no reason worth the name. So that puts me at one or two degrees of separation from the slaughter--immune from the worst suffering but sensitized to the reality of it, aware that something awful happened to real people.

So, yes, I do think we should be paying attention and trying to think it through. Mike, for example, has posted thoughtfully on the shootings. In fact, it's hard for me to figure out how one can pay too much thoughtful attention to the stupid, heartbreaking murder of so many people. (It's not hard to figure out how one can pay too much exploitative, sleazy attention to it; for that, one has only to turn on half of TV news about the story.) So I don't think my objection is about the absolute amount of attention; I think it's about the relative amount of the attention.

Look, if you will, at the pic at the top of this post. The New York Times has three stories dedicated to the Tech killings. That's down from yesterday, I think. It has only one dedicated to the bombing deaths of 115 Iraqis today. Now, of course US reporters will cover US deaths more closely. Their readers and viewers care more and not necessarily for racist or xenophobic reasons but simply because we are taught to think of ourselves as Americans, and so when Americans die, we feel more personally involved. There's something disturbing about that, I think, but reporters aren't and can't be entirely detached from their own cultures. So American reporters cover American deaths more closely. (Plus, of course, it's easier, cheaper, and safer to send reporters to Virginia than to Anbar, so there will be more reporters on the ground anyway.)

Still, there is something wrong here. I've written before that our media often seem to treat some murder victims as way more important that others, and some of that seems to be happening with the Tech slayings. Thirty-three dead (counting the killer) is overwhelming at Tech because there have never been that many people killed there in a single day, not for decades at least, and there's nothing even approaching 33 homicides per year on the Tech campus. So the story is that something shocking has happened. But there there are neighborhoods in the US where 33 people die each year pretty regularly, most of them about the same age as the kids at Tech. That to me is at least as shocking, when you stop to think about it. Which we don't, by and large, unless we live in those neighborhoods. And we don't, by and large. So it keeps happening.

But even our radically uneven sensitivity to death isn't all that bothers me about it. I also think it's because--through a combination of mutually reinforcing practicalities and prejudices--the reporting encourages us think of the dead in Blacksburg as people and the dead in Iraq (and Detroit and Afghanistan...) as numbers. The New York Times, for example, has an interactive feature that gives pictures and details about each of the victims. Even the two currently unidentified victims count as individuals.

Of the Baghdad bombing, the Times can tell us only that the victims were in a "predominately Shiite district." Even the Iraqi reporters who contributed to the story remain anonymous (no doubt to protect them from insurgent attacks). And there's something deeply wrong about that. Without discounting the serious practical obstacles to identifying the Baghdad victims at all much less learning enough about them to provide photos and biographical snapshots, I think it hurts us that we won't ever see get those details.

In fact, simply because I happened to have some small connection to somebody from Virginia Tech at about the time of the shootings, I realize viscerally how angry and mystified and terrified people in Blacksburg must feel right now. I realize the genuine importance of the story, which, ironically makes me think what we're paying too much attention to it or, better, that we're paying too little attention to the ongoing slaughter in Iraq in comparison with the Tech deaths.

I don't say this because almost four times as many died in the recent attacks; it's not about numbers. I say it because it finally sunk in for me how hard and how long everybody touched directly by the Tech killings will have to struggle to come to terms with what happened there. How many nightmare-plagued nights, how many involuntary flinches at popping sounds, how many happy memories of friends that turn sour when the reality of their deaths reasserts itself. The events of a single day will affect the survivors for years, probably for the rest of their lives. I'm obtuse, so it took me a while to really deal with the enormity and the intensity of that. And then an even more overwhelming realization hit me: in Baghdad, for virtually everyone there, it's not the events of a single day. It's the events of days like that every month, if not every week, piled on top of one another, year after year after year.

And that's the story that's missing, I think. The unremitting trauma of being alive in Baghdad these days. Despite all the numbers and video footage, I don't think we as a country have really thought through what it means to live in a place where you can count on ten, twenty, fifty times a year hearing the same news that panicked parents and friends heard about the Tech shootings--there has been a senseless mass killing where your daughter goes to school, where your son works, where your wife studies. Only the families of soldiers on the ground have to deal with that. But that's what living though war actually means. And until we understand that on a gut level, we'll never understand what the war has meant for Iraqis.

Of course, maybe this has been obvious to all of you from the start. Maybe I'm just empathy deficient. If so, today I'm wishing I were a little more deficient. I'd feel better, anyway. But this war was started by people on all sides with that particular defect, people who think in abstractions like money and power or glory and honor and national will. But people who have the power to start violence should think in terms of distant pops and ominously ringing telephones, of terror, loss, and the rage that grows out of them.

Good News!

By which, of course, I mean bad news.

The prestigious British medical journal The Lancet recently released a study indicating that about 650,000 Iraqis have died during the Iraq War.

Some in the British government are questioning the study's sampling method, even though the method is the standard one for battleground estimates. But the chief scientific advisor to the British Ministry of Defense has said that the estimate is pretty much as good as possible, and even its British critics in the Foreign Office have written, "The survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished, it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones."

At Iraq Body Count, the death toll is at about 62,500. But, as they point out, they're counting only reported deaths. And, as they point out, "It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is the sad nature of war." So The Lancet figure isn't necessarily inconsistent with the IBC figure.

Still, if we're optimistic, maybe the IBC number is only, say, a 10% undercount. That would mean that only 70,000 Iraqis had died since the war began. Which is a mere 23 times more than died in the 9/11 attacks. Cheer up, Iraqis! Good news!

Death Counts-Iraq, America

The UN Assistance Mission to Iraq just released estimated casualty counts for 2006. It says that 34,452 Iraqis died violently in 2006 and slightly more than that were injured by violence.

The Iraqi government disputes the numbers and says that only 12,357 died.

I'm betting that the UN's number is a lot closer. The Iraqi government is apparently taking its figures from published news reports, while the UN is getting them from Iraqi hospitals and the Iraqi Ministry of Health. More bodies will make it into the hospital than into newspaper stories (Iraq Body count, which also operates on published news reports, says as much on its website).

In perspective: the US has just over 11 times as many inhabitants as Iraq, so the violence Iraqis endured last year was the equivalent of 138,398 to 385,862 Americans getting killed. The most recent FBI stats on the US murder rate say that 17,000 Americans were murdered in 2005. So, per capita, 8 to 23 times as many Iraqis died as Americans last year.

Of course, the good news is that you if add the Americans killed in Iraq to the US murder rate, that ratio goes down a little.

Just in case you're feeling good to be an American, make sure you check your race and gender. Unsurprisingly, it's good to be white. Perhaps surprisingly, it's good to be a woman. While the average American violent death rate is about 6 per 100,000, that average combines very different subtotals. Consider these selected murder rates per 100,000:

All men: 7.8
All women: 2.0
White women: 1.8
Black women: 6.0
All black: 19.8
All white: 3.2
White men: 7.8
Black men: 33.5

The Iraqi violent death rate is between 46 (UN) to 128 (Iraqi govt.) per 100,000. So white Americans in general are 14 to 40 times less likely to be killed than the average Iraqi. Black Americans in general are 2.3 to 6.5 times less likely. Black men are 1.3 to 3.8 times less likely. And given the strong correlation between low income and violent death, poor and working-class Americans of all races are at an even higher risk of violent death. So if the Iraqi government's figures are right (unlikely), poor black men in America are at least as likely to die violently as the average Iraqi.

(The bad news about the earlier good news about adding the death toll of American soldiers to the domestic murder rate is that, since black men make up a disproportionately high percentage of the armed services, doing so would also raise the murder rate of American black men.)

Of course, the nature of the violence in Iraq almost certainly means that significantly more Iraqi men are dying than Iraqi women, so the above comparisons aren't quite oranges to oranges. But even if it's apples to oranges, it's apples nobody can like. Imagine if instead of sending soldiers and reconstruction money to invade and occupy Iraq, we'd sent teachers and reconstruction money to stabilize and revive poor parts of America. Or, if you're easily depressed, don't.