Casualties in Iraq

It’s too early to say for certain, but the civilian casualties in Iraq seem to be dropping. Here’s a plot of the casualties identified by Iraq Coalition Casualties. This data is based solely on news reports, so it is expected to underreport deaths. But the trend is important:

The November data was prorated based on casualties during the first week. The Iraq Body Count tallies are likely to be different, but since they don’t conveniently tabulate their data by month, I used the ICC data.

The Brookings Institute’s Iraq Index uses the Iraq Body Count as a basis for their estimates, but they massage the data, yielding higher tallies. They include all deaths by violence, rather than war- or terror-related deaths. Here’s a comparison of the data above with the Brookings estimates:

The Brookings estimates only run through September and don’t track well with the ICC data, but they, too, show a decline in violent deaths.

I certainly hope this trend continues.

Election Day

I’m not going to post much on the elections unless it gets interesting. I’ll try to put up something later for those who need relief from the election coverage.

Vote hard.