[R] iraq statistics - OT

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 5/19/06, Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck at gmail.com> wrote:
> I came across this one:
>
> http://www.nysun.com/article/32787
>
> which says that the violent death rate in Iraq (which presumably
> includes violent deaths from the war) is lower than the violent
> death rate in major American cities.
>
> Does anyone have any insights from statistics on how to
> interpret this?
>

Since I posted this a number of people have responded online and
offline and have included a number of links.  I am providing the
links from the offline responders.

I was hoping to summarize all this in an objective fashion
focused on statistics but there is enough
information here that I was concerned I might not do a thorough
job so I am simply providing the links plus some short comments
to summarize the links that did not already appear on the list.

The original idea of making this comparison was apparently due to
US Rep. Steve King and the first link gives
his rebuttal to critics who made similar comments to those
shown on the list so far.  His main points are that the data does
not come from him, he used published figures on icasualty.com
(and for US the sources cited in the link) and that his original
comments were in the context of civilian safety and so it would
not be appropriate to include police which is why he excluded them
(I had originally thought it included all violent deaths but that is
not the case).
Since my original post was about vacationing in Iraq I would
think that excluding police would also apply to that too.   A number of
people on the list did point out that defining violent death was key.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110008402

Part of the previous link is in response to the following link:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110008392#iraq

Original source of the iraq data:
http://icasualties.org/oif/

Story of one person who tried to pursue the numbers:
http://zenbeatnik.blogspot.com/2006/05/where-numbers-lead.html