8 October 2004
Charles Bowman
Graphing the dead
War results in death and injury to humans and the destruction of infrastructure. Knowledge of these 'indicators' of the war-effort is useful in evaluating government policy.But the White House and mainstream media don't make it easy for you to get a sense of the human toll in Iraq and the on-going destruction of its oil-producing capability.
Fortunately, a number of organizations keep track of the casualties, and make their findings freely available on the interenet. Here is a partial list of those organizations:
Civilian casualties in Iraq: http://www.iraqbodycount.net
Coalition casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, contractor casualties in Iraq: http://icasualties.org
Coalition casualties, U.S. Wounded: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/
Attacks on Iraq's oil pipeline infrastructure:http://www.iags.org/iraqpipelinewatch.htm
The data shown by these web sites is listed in tabular form, with one exception: the CNN web site simply lists the current number of U.S. wounded in combat, as reported by the Pentagon. Since January 2004, I have kept a weekly record of this number - albeit in tablular format.
The table format makes it easy to track of the current numbers, but it's difficult to develop a historical perspective of the data.One solution is to make plots of the data in the tables. A plot (sometimes called a graph) is simply a snapshot -- a visual representation -- of all the data in the table. Graphs show the trend of things, how that trend changes over time, and allows one to make predictions.
If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, a graph is worth 10,000 numbers in a table.
I searched the internet and the news media, but could not find graphs displaying casualties or the attacks on Iraq's infrastructure over time. So, I wrote computer programs to calculate each week's toll (casualties, wounded, etc.) from the data in the tables listed above, and made plots of those numbers.
Each point in these graphs represents a week's toll added to the previous week's toll.
For each plot, the horizontal line at the bottom (usually called the x-axis) is time, and the vertical line at the left (y-axis) is the number of interest (number of deaths, number of wounded, etc).
Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.
