The Real Death Toll in Iraq

Alright, it's time to get a bit more serious than Brett Favre, much more serious. As of July 14th, 2008, 4119 American soldiers and 314 troops from other nations in the "coalition of the willing" have been killed in Iraq since the war started on March 20th, 2003. An additional 30,349 have been wounded although some estimates put the real number closer to 100,000.

Yet as awful as those stastics are, they are really much worse. According to CBS, in 2005 alone 6256 American soldiers and veterans commited suicide! This shouldn't be that shocking giving the revelations in 2007 of the cockroach infested building 18 at Walter Reed as well as the well documented effects of post traumatic stress syndrome. Nonetheless, it's just as horrifying.

What makes an accurate estimation of the number of suicides among our veterans even more difficult is that CBS had to fight tooth and nail to get this information and to my knowledge hasn't been able to get information for 2004, 2006, 2007 and so far in 2008. This is nothing new for the Pentagon, they typically won't even let the media see the coffins of those killed in action. Still, it would probably be safe to assume that the epidemic is even more widespread today as soldiers are serving a third and fourth tour as well as longer tours.

However, I will be generous in trying to extrapolate a rough estimate and use the 6256 suicides as a baseline for each year. We can then look at what the suicide rate should have been among the armed forces by looking at the national average. There are surely many demographic differences that should be accounted for, but I'm just looking for a rough estimate. In 2005, 32,637 people committed suicide in the United States, or about 0.0011%, although among males it was about 0.0017%. Since the military is predominantly male, let’s use the 0.0017% to find what should be the average (1). While the suicides are predominantly among veterans that served in Iraq, the data obtained by CBS are suicides among the armed forces, so I will use that total. Since most of the armed forces have not seen combat in Iraq, again I'm being generous. Regardless, there are currently 1,380,028 men and women in the military (2), so there should be about 2346 suicides per year. The difference between 6256 and 2346 is 3910. I think it is reasonable to attribute the increased suicides to the war, which has been going on for about 5 1/4 years. So 3910 X 5.25 = 20,528 estimated suicides attributable to the war since it began! Add that to the 4119 soldiers who were killed in action and we arrive at a grand total of 24,647 deaths.

Again this can not be verified given the information I have access to and a much more thorough study would have to be taken to come up with a more supportable number. However, this is a story that has barely made it into the public and needs to be reported on more, although I should give credit to CBS who did a story on it back in November.

We must also not forget the huge cost for the citizens of Iraq. The official number of Iraqi dead is around 93,778 and probably much higher. According the Opinion Research Business the number could be over a million! Many more have been forced to leave the country, the infrastructure is still heavily damaged and the nation is stuck amidst terrible ethnic strife. It's nice that a tyrant like Saddam Hussein is gone, but with no WMD, no connection to Al Qaeda, and the enormous human and financial cost, if we haven't yet done it, it's time to admit we made a horrible, horrible mistake.

(1) U.S.A. Suicide: 2005 Official Final Data, American Association of Suicidology, http://www.suicidology.org/

(2) Active Duty Military Personnel by Rank/Grade, Department of Defense, August 31, 2007, http://www.defenselink.mil/