Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Zero Plus in Iraq

I earlier wrote that we would never get to zero casualties in Iraq since even without combat casualties, we'll suffer losses in Iraq due to accidents and sickness.

This year, 69 of our 144 deaths so far in Iraq have been from non-combat reasons, or about 6 per month from non-combat reasons. This is better than the ten I figured we'd see as we stopped large-scale routine combat missions.

At what point do we stop counting deaths from accidents and sickness in Iraq as a cost of the Iraq War? I mean, I assume at some point long ago we stopped calling these non-combat deaths in Germany a cost of defeating the Nazis in World War II?