Thursday, March 25, 2004
Suicides in Iraq
An Army report notes that the suicide rate among GIs in Iraq is 17.3 per 100,000, compared with the overall service average of 12.8 per 100,000 last year. NYT has run this story twice, each time implying that this is a "much higher rate". While I take suicide very seriously, this claim is quite overstated. There were 23 suicides in Iraq. Under the overall service rate, we would have expected 17. Maybe the difference is just random variation---suicides are complicated events, and we don't know what personal anguish these soldiers were under. Or maybe its actually a low figure, considering the circumstances. The NYT article adds that "[i]n one startling finding, in the survey of 756 soldiers late last summer, 52 percent of them said their personal morale was low or very low, and 72 percent said their whole unit's morale was that bad. Most of those surveyed had been in combat." I don't know what the historical relationship between morale and suicide is, but this doesn't sound like Exhibit A against the war. That would be the more than 500 soldiers killed.
