Waiting For Sunday

Friends are still sending me emails that say that the death-rate of US soldiers in Iraq isn’t all that different from the murder rate in big cities like Detroit. The implication, I guess, is that people die everywhere, so why get upset over some deaths in Iraq? Or maybe the idea is that our troops are as safe in Baghdad as Detroit.

Come on! If you need to defend our Iraq activities, put some thought into it and stop sending me this nonsensical data.

First off, if ever there was an apples -to- oranges comparison, it has to be US soldiers to Detroit civilians. Put these well-trained, well-armed and (hopefully by now) well-armored men and women in Detroit and their death rate drops to zero.

CNN says that 113 American troops died in Iraq in December 2006, 102 from hostile action. For 2006, the number of American deaths was 814. If I read this chart right, the Detroit metro area suffered about 440 murders in 2005 (the most recent year of complete data), so our men and women in Iraq are dying at twice the rate of murders in Detroit (I can’t believe I’m stooping to make this point, but that was the comparison in the email).

But the real story is the CIVILIAN causalities in Iraq. Today CBS News quotes a UN report that says that nearly 35,000 Iraqi civilians were killed last year. (I presume CBS means these people were killed in war-related violence, but shoddy reporting makes it hard to say for certain). Compare that to 16,692 murders in the US in 2005 and you have a better comparison (and remember that Iraq has less than 10% of our population).

Now I’m not saying that US troops are killing all these civilians (I don’t believe that for a minute, and I am VERY pro-troops), and I’m not saying that an immediate US withdrawal would end the violence (though I think us getting out would help - four years on, I’m pretty anti-war too).

I am saying: Quit sending me emails that downplay the deaths of our soldiers and ignore the civilian causalities. When Christians forward this nonsense, we reveal how knee jerk our political views are and how little thinking we do about Jesus, violence and our faith.

In fact, don’t send me any emails that you don’t write yourself.