An Innumerate Look at Iraq

John Paulos, a math professor at Temple University, wrote a series of books years ago about American "innumeracy," the quantitative corollary to illiteracy, by which he referred to basic misunderstandings about statistics and probabilities. Innumeracy was the first of the oeuvre, and laid out such commonplace mistakes as fearing a trip to Europe because of the chance of a terrorist attack (about 1 in 238,000) while remaining sanguine about driving to the airport for a trip somewhere "safer," oblivious to the 1 in 5,000 chance of a fatal car wreck on the way to the plane. We misunderstand statistics and probabilities for a variety of reasons, such as a "focus"or "selection" error where dramatized events acquire an importance out of scale with their actual frequency, or where we fail to appreciate proportionality in assessing a risk.

I was thinking about this phenomenon recently while reading about the 100 or so deaths per day in Iraq because of car bombings, kidnappings, drive-by shootings and other mayhem inflicted on the citizenry, and I realized that a kind of reverse innumeracy was at work in my own thinking. The reports on daily carnage, total killed in Iraq, etc., never (in my reading) attempt to place these numbers in a population context, so we might acquire a sense of scale in assessing the impact on daily life in Iraq. The absolute numbers, in other words, don't tell the whole story.

Iraq has about 25 million people. The official census of the United States places the population here at about 300 million, or 12 times larger. Thus, here is what the Iraqi numbers would look like if scaled up to American proportions:

1. If 100 people per day are getting blown up, tortured to death or shot in Iraq, this would translate to 1,200 American citizens getting blown up, tortured to death or shot (over and above baseline violent crime rates) each and every day. For comparison, the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, which was at the time the deadliest single act of terrorism in American history, killed 138 people, slightly more than the actual number of Iraqis killed every day as the result of insurgent violence and the ongoing civil war. Thus, at Iraqi levels, the USA would now sustain 8.7 Oklahoma City bombings each and every day under such conditions. 9-11 caused about 2,700 deaths; thus, at Iraqi levels, every two days or so the U.S. would witness slaughter equal to the worst attack in American history.

2. The total number of Iraqis violently killed, over and above the preexisting death rate, since the American invasion of March, 2003, is the subject of debate. President Bush has conceded 30,000; the Baghdad morgue report in late June estimated 50,000; the famous Johns Hopkins report estimated about 100,000 (at the time, almost 2 years ago). Some estimates have been higher than these.

Scaled up to American proportions, these death tallies are 360,000; 600,000; and 1.2 million. The lowest estimate (based on Bush's concession) means that proportionally more Iraqis have died since the U.S. invasion than all battle deaths of U.S. service personnel during World War II (about 291,000). The middle estimate produces a death toll exceeding the total number of battle and nontheater deaths of both armies during the American Civil War (about 500,000); and the highest number (Johns Hopkins study) exceeds the total number of battle deaths (651,000) plus nontheater deaths (525,000) of all wars fought during America's entire history, beginning with the American Revolution.

3. Using a similar analysis, how is the American occupation perceived by the Iraqi people? The Pentagon has deployed approximately 130,000 service personnel in Iraq, equal to about 1/2 of 1% of the total population there. A proportionate occupying force in the U.S.A. would equal 1,560,000 troops spread out over the American landscape, driving our roads in fearsome Humvees bristling with machine guns, building permanent bases, importing contractors and dictating the operation of our governance. We would notice, in other words.

And given how many of us were dying every single day, we would probably begin to resent the occupation, too.