As the casualty count of American soldiers killed in Iraq during the war and insurgency approaches 2000, a number of left-wing groups have talked about using the 2000th soldier killed to push their political agenda.
Lets examine the "cost" in lives for this war.
The war has been ongoing since March 2003, say 30 months. Over that time 2000 American soldier have been killed, which is about 67 solders per month.
How does this compare to the murder rate in someplace like Jamaica?
This links to the murder rates on nationmaster.com. Jamaica is listed as number 3 per capita with 887 murders in 2000 and a per capita rate of 37. This info is sorely out of date.
This article quotes the Jamaican murder rate at 60 per 100,000. The population of Jamaica is about 2.3 million people.
This article puts the total number of murders in Jamaica at over 1100 over 2001 and this more recent article has the total number of murders for 2004 at 1030 on October 3rd, 2004, three quarters of the way through the year. Extrapolating to the end of 2004 would put the murder rate at 1373 for 2004
The Jamaica murder rate has been growing over the past few years, and I would bet the homestead that the number of murders in Jamaica will exceed 1100 for 2005.
This puts the murder rate of US soliders in Iraq at about 800 per year for the entire period of the war, significantly less than the 1100 Jamaicans killed every year. As more Iraqi forces are training and they take over more of their security, I am sure that the US killed rate has been dropping.
2000 America soldiers killed so that 24 million Iraqis could be free.
What do Jamaicans have to show for the approximately 2750 people dead over the past 30 months?
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