Dr. Forbush Thinks

Like all Americans I have heard that things weren’t going that great in Iraq. But, how bad could they be? Does anyone really know how to determine when a War is won or lost? Especially a War like the one in Iraq. We certainly could sign a peace treaty with the Iraqi government, but we aren’t fighting the Iraqi government, so that doesn’t really apply in this case. So, when we are fighting a guerilla war against insurgents, what determines victory?

Well, if you listened to George W Bush’s repetitive speech this morning we all know that we are making progress in Iraq. And we know that our goal in Iraq is to eliminate the threat to the Iraqis people from the insurgents. What is the current level of threat? What will the level need to be for us to declare Iraq safe enough for us to leave? The President will not tell us these numbers, because it would give comfort or something to the enemy.

Well, one way for me to estimate when we are going to leave is to look at the number of American’s killed in Iraq. If we are getting a handle on the insurgents, this number is certainly going down. And, if we look at the slope of this line we should be able to estimate when that number will intersect zero. This will at least give us a handle on when our troops are going home, right?

So, I went over to a web site that has the monthly number of US, or coalition troops killed per month. The information also tells us how many soldiers were killed per month or the US occupation. You can see my data here.

Since there was an initial Battle to take over the country we would expect a much higher number of casualties over the first two months, so I dropped this data out of my study. May 1st, the first day of my data actually corresponds to the day George W Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared mission accomplished. I calculated the number of soldiers killed per day for each given month and fit a trend-line to the data. There isn’t anything magic about this simple statistical study. But, the results are much different than I expected.

Based on this data it turns out that the number of soldiers being killed in Iraq is actually increasing, not decreasing. In May 2003 the rate of US casualties was about 1.6 soldiers per day. Currently the rate is about 2.9 casualties per day. This isn’t a one month fluctuation, but a trend that continues to go up. Actually there are quite a few points that tend to follow this line. So, based on this analysis it looks like the number of casualties will only go up until the Bush administration changes its plan. However, if we stay the course the rate of US casualties will only go higher.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." -- Albert Einstein








Politics, Iraq War, Iraq, Impeach Bush