We have been told this convoluted tale that somehow the government in Iran is responsible for the deaths of 170 US soldiers. Thinking about that number I got to wondering how many friendly fire deaths there have been in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In typical large scale conflicts, the rate of friendly fire deaths run about 10-15% of all combat deaths. Data on previous conflicts are widely available. Oddly enough, data on this war is not so easy to come by. The only reference I could find was a military claim in early 2006 widely reported in the media that only 17 deaths were from friendly fire in the two theaters. This included the famous case of Pat Tilman, which you will recall was first covered up by the military and labelled hostile fire in combat. Here is a link:
http://www.usatoday.com/...
This means that at that time the rate of friendly fire deaths was 1% of the total, a number unprecedented in past conflicts, and while unfortunately we haven't fought enough wars for a statisticaly significant sample, the number is out of the range of any past experience.
So here's the question. Is it correct, or have friendly fire incidents been effectively covered up like the Pat Tilman case was? If past experience is a guide we would expect that to date there have been 300 to 500 firendly fire deaths out of the total 3,127. That would mean that the US would have been expected to kill far more US troops than they are blaming on the Iranians.
For some further perspective, note that there have been 655 non-hostile deaths
http://icasualties.org/...
to date. What caused these? Accidents? Natural Causes? It is a slightly higher number than what would be typically expected from an age cohort of 25, which I pick out of the air as an average. My point being that it is hard to draw any grand conclusions from 170 deaths in the middle of a 4 pronged civil war. Who set off the "EFPs"? Were US troops targeted? Were they, shall we say, "collateral damage"?
Obviously we need to be skeptical about administration claims made by inference and not backed up by solid, or any, evidence. This is Cheney's 1% solution, and you can see where that gets us. We need to attack it from all angles. I'm not saying its going to stop an attack, but if its based on even more lies, the American people and the world must know.