An interesting new statistical argument has been rolled out recently to help buttress conservative claims that all is well in Iraq and the violence and death there is actually not as bad as say the statistics from several major American cities.  While not as clever as Brit Hume comparing U.S. casualties in Iraq to homicide rates in California, this argument was first advanced by Rep. Steve King (R-IA), pride of Storm Lake, IA who I'm certain knows more about price supports for corn than foreign policy, and then moved along by Rush Limbaugh and a host other right wing commentators.  The argument goes something like this:

I happened to catch Rep. Steve King, a Republican of Iowa, on C-span last week and he rattled off some startling figures that demonstrate how off-base journalists are when it comes to reporting on the war in Iraq. According to Mr. King, the violent death rate in Iraq is 25.71 per 100,000. That may sound high, but not when you compare it to places like Colombia (61.7), South Africa (49.6), Jamaica (32.4), and Venezuela (31.6). How about the violent death rates in American cities? New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina was 53.1. FBI statistics for 2004-05 have Washington at 45.9, Baltimore at 37.7, and Atlanta at 34.9.

You see Rep. King is trying to make the point that the news media is just blowing things out of proportion when they "dwell" on massive suicide bombings, dead and wounded Americans and Iraqis, sectarian violence, or even waves of execution style deaths happening in Iraq, but its interesting how he picks his statistics.  I would think that if you're going to talk about aggregate national violent death statistics (homicides? suicides? what are we talking about?)  it doesn't make sense to compare them to homicide rates in individual major U.S. cities, does it?  Wouldn't you want to compare say the rate of violent deaths per 100,000 of Baghdad to that of Washington D.C. instead of D.C. to the entire country of Iraq so that maybe you were dealing with the same thing or category?  That seems pretty logical but I'm not sure it advances the purposes of Rep. King and others. 

Now what if we do compare Baghdad to D.C.?  I don't have any current death rate statistics for 2006 but if you look at Washington D.C. homicide statistics through April of this year you'll find there were 47 homicides.  Now let's look at numbers from Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. The number of violent deaths in Baghdad from January to March 2006 was 3,472 deaths.  Now lets add another 1,091 deaths in April and you have a total of 4,563 violent deaths in Baghdad to 47 in our nation's capital over the same time period.  If we adjust for the fact that Bagdad has 10 times more people and multiply the D.C. numbers by 10 then if D.C. was Baghdad we would see 470 deaths at this point, not 47.  Where does that leave us?  I might be wrong but by my calculations the D.C. violent death rate is roughly 9.4 per 100,000 and Baghdad's is about 91.26 per 100,000 through the month of April.  Seems like a big difference to me?

I'm not sure it gets any better if we compare New Orleans to Haditha or Baltimore to Tikrit but I'll guarantee that if hundreds are killed everyday in bombings in Baltimore or the bodies of fifty people with bound hands, killed execution style, were dumped everyday only blocks away from the White House that 1.) the media would cover it extensively, 2.) most people would move far away from any of those places until that type of extreme violence ended, and 3.) most of the rest of the world would be wondering what the hell is going on in the U.S.?