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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mistermj who wrote (211760)	1/4/2007 8:22:41 PM
From: Lou Weed	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

<<Why do you have to ask why somebody would post anything here?>> Your refusal to answer a simple question speaks volumes as far as I'm concerned. Now that you've awoken my curiosity on the subject (you probably should have just answered!). After my first google I found this table from the "Defense Manpower Data Center, Statistical Information Analysis Division". siadapp.dior.whs.mil Before we go any further, I'm assuming because you continually paste a tailored excel bar graph as "fact" then you should have no problem with the validity of this table's contents and its source. Seems pretty official to me but then again I have been fooled before.....not unlike yourself. Being an Engineer and having to use statistical analysis on a regular basis, one of the first things that you learn is that when studying raw data you must perform normalization before any conclusions can be drawn. Looking at raw totals as a comparison can be very misleading. "Rates" is the important word here and fortunately this table has them all calculated out for us......in the form of deaths per 100,000 serving. Warning......from here on I will draw my conclusions from the data. You can simply stop reading here, reply back and call me a godless pinko liberal or carry on and learn why your graph is obviously a politically contrived mindf*** in order to convey 1) Bush's Iraq war isn't nearly as bad as all those liberals are making it out to be, 2) Clinton is the spawn of Satan and 3) Clinton is the spawn of Satan. Let's look at the Clinton years ('92 to '99) with respect to the following datapoints......Total Military FTE, Total Deaths, Accident, Hostile Action, Homicide, Illness. Total Military FTE declined annually from 1.9M in '92 to 1.5M by the end of his terms. Total deaths also declined from 1,293 to 796. The accident rate fell from 34.6 per 100,000 in '92 to 28.6 per 100,000....so not only was the military total number reducing but it was also getting safer to be in there with the exception of one year (1996). Note that this was the only year in Clinton's terms when there was a hostile action rate recorded (0.1 per 100,000). I'm assuming this was either Somalia or the Balkans or both? Maybe some of the more seasoned historians can shed more light. Homicide and Illness rates also steadily declined under Clinton....my own conclusion from this is that the better morale during peacetime leads to the homicide rate reduction and advancements in medicine over the 8 years led to the Illness rate reduction. I may be wrong but it seems feasible to me. Bottom line, in all these categories there was a downward trend during those years....seems like a good thing to me. Now let's look at the Bush years ('00 to '04 from the table) using the same analysis. The total Military FTE carried on its downward trend until 2001 where it started to ascend again, for very obvious reasons. Total Deaths as a result did the same thing but at a much steeper slope, 891 in '01 to 1,887 in '04. The Accident rate also rose (to be expected during wartime) but where the table really shows the reason for the dramatic rise is in the Hostile Action rates......going from 0.1 per 100,000 in '01 to 43.1 per 100,000 in '04. I would hazard a guess that this rate has carried on this upward trend in '05 and '06 also. By doing some deeper analysis we can see where the trends are and can speculate with pretty good certainty the reasons for these trend shifts. This my friend is not rocket science and it only takes a little digging to see the bigger picture. If I wanted to be a partisan hack I could create a bargraph similar to yours that shows Military Deaths in '99 under Clinton at 796 as one bar and Military Deaths under Bush in '04 as 1,887.....that would be a "fact" also, right?!?!? One more thing, as an Applications Engineer who writes datasheets and app. notes on a regular basis, I notice that the author of your graph has also used an old trick. By not referencing the y-axis to zero you can create a larger visual difference in the bars which has a tendency to "exaggerate" the difference to the untrained eye. The fact that the 2 parameters that he's comparing in the graph are totally non "apples-to-apples" seems to have been picked up by everyone but yourself. MON.