A barrage of car bombs, mortar attacks and missiles battered the Shiite Muslim slum of Sadr City on Thursday afternoon, killing around 200 people and injuring as many more in the single deadliest assault on Iraqi civilians since the start of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
The highly orchestrated attacks on the stronghold of anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr threatened to unleash yet another cycle of reprisal killings and push the country closer to all-out civil war. The attacks, targeting the heart of Baghdad’s Shiite community, seem designed to stoke the sectarian rage gripping Iraq.
Even as mourners gathered Friday for a heavily guarded funeral procession the attacks continued. Local authorities reported that 17 people died when a car bomb exploded near an auto dealership in Tal Afar, 260 miles northwest of Baghdad. The Associated Press reported that several mortar rounds exploded near the Abu Hanifa mosque, a site important to Sunni Muslims.
…and conservatives would have us believe it’s still not that bad.
I wrote in June that based on the data at that time, the murder rate in Iraq outside of Baghdad is about the same as American cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and Milwaukee. With the current numbers, it looks like that would still be true.
A consensus seems to have developed that Iraq is a disaster because of out-of-control sectarian violence. That consensus is driving proposals to change our policy in Iraq, perhaps in the direction of a pull-out that could lead to truly cataclysmic violence. So I think it makes sense to step back and get a more realistic picture of the level of what is happening in Iraq: violent? Yes. A disaster comparable to a civil war? No.
We’re still debating the comparisons between Iraq and U.S. cities? Hasn’t this been debunked enough?
In recent months, we’ve seen one far-right blogger compare Iraq to Philadelphia, another compare Iraq to Milwaukee, and one far-right House member compare Iraq to DC. They’re all terribly, embarrassingly wrong.
For one thing, these supporters of the war just have their numbers wrong. TP recently noted that Iraq is “22 times more violent than Washington, D.C.”
For another, the comparison itself is misguided. Kieran Healy did a terrific job of tearing the whole argument to shreds at Crooked Timber, and this portion stood out.
This is why comparisons to death rates in civilian settings — even comparatively violent ones — are misguided. Anyone who thinks that someone walking around Philly is more likely to be violently attacked than a marine out on patrol in Baghdad is out of their mind. Moreover, troops on patrol are kitted out with protective gear, travel in well-organized groups, and have guns. And yet they still die in large numbers. Crude comparisons of death rates across very different settings mask big differentials in exposure to violent incidents, ignore fundamental differences in the structure of those incidents, and — in the case of military fatalities — ignore the huge improvements in field medicine that (according to data for 2004) allowed the ratio of wounded to killed soldiers in Iraq to be more than two and a half times what it was in Vietnam. Bear in mind, too, that all of what I’ve said so far ignores the elephant in the room, which is that the death rates in the article refer exclusively to U.S. forces on active duty in the whole of Iraq and not to regular Iraqi civilians. Contrary to what you may have heard, these people are not magically immune to the effects of car bombs, death squads, or suicide bombers. […]
[T]he acid test is quite straightforward. Would you — can you? — take a commercial flight to Baghdad tomorrow, get a taxi from the airport to the city, stay at a local hotel, see some sights and eat out at a decent restaurant without being in fear of your life? What about Philadelphia?
That’s easy enough to understand, isn’t it?