Parity
Just noting in passing, that by the D^2D standard metric of societal violence, the NI72c unit[1], the Iraq Body Count database reached a level of 4,043 violent civilian deaths in 2010, which is almost exactly 1.0 NI72c. Even though the IBC database definitely undercounts violent events (probably by a lesser amount now than during the horror years of 2006/7), this would definitely correspond to an underlying civilian violence rate of less than 3.5 NI72c, which is the murder rate in Jamaica during a non-election year in the 1990s, and which I would regard as the absolute worst level of violence consistent with any kind of normal life at all.
Now that the Iraqi conflict is coming to an end, it is worth looking at the period 2003-2010; during this seven year period, proportionately 3.5 times more civilians are listed in the IBC index as having died than during the 30 years of the Northern Ireland conflict - the true numeraire is very likely to be more than ten times.
[1] Scaling per-capita violent death rates so as to match up to the 250 deaths coded as "civilian" in the Sutton Index for the Northern Irish conflict in 1972, the worst year of the Troubles.
Very good.
ReplyDeleteI seem to remember, however, that the old DSq metric declined to discriminate between civilian & non-civilian deaths, for good evidential and symptomatic reasons.
Marc Mulholland
We did it both ways - hence we had the NI72 and NI72c measures - for the reasons you say. But when you're comparing versus the IBC data, they have quite a restrictive standard for counting a death as "civilian", so they need to be compared to the 72c in my opinion - although I am open to be convinced on this as in both conflicts there were lots of "paramilitaries" who really hadn't gone out of their house that day willing to die for anything.
ReplyDelete