Counting in Iraq

With the three-year anniversary of Gulf War II just a couple of weeks away, I thought these grim statistics should receive a bit more publicity than they have been getting: U.S. military deaths in Iraq hit 2,300 this week, while those of all Coalition forces crossed the 2,500 barrier. Those two figures come out to an average of 2.13 U.S. deaths and 2.32 coalition deaths in Iraq for the past 1,081 days. The number of dead Iraqi soldiers and civilians has, of course, been somewhere between ten to fifty times as great. Here's a question: when will the U.S. death toll in Iraq exceed that for 9/11? Let's see. According to CNN, the final WTC death toll was 2,749. For all of the attacks, the offical count is apparently 2,986. So, assuming the death rate in Iraq stays constant (which it won't, but I'll ignore that for now), U.S. military deaths in Iraq should surpass that of the World Trade Center around October 1st; they would then surpass the grand total for 9/11 sometime in late January 2007. Coalition military deaths in Iraq, meanwhile, should surpass that for the World Trade Center in mid-June of this year and that for 9/11 in its entirety in late September.