Visualizations : Civilian Casualties In Iraq : Why don't June 2007, July 2007...

A liberal professor at a research university, a registered Democrat, has an interesting blog with many data visualizations at http://engram-backtalk.blogspot.com/2007/08/confused-about-casualties-and.html

He uses data from “Iraq Coalition Causality Count, which provide the most accurate depiction of casualty trends in Iraq that you can find anywhere on the web.” http://icasualties.org/oif/IraqiDeaths.aspx

He does a good job of differentiating between the civilians killed by al Qaeda terrorists seeking to incite civil war, and those killed by Sunni insurgents seeking to win a civil war.

About the data (Iraqi Civilian Casualties) he says the following:

In a nutshell, the troop surge became fully operational in June, and civilian casualties that month were down by 30% compared to the prior 7-month period (a period during which casualties were high and stable). In July, civilian casualties were down about 13% compared to that 7-month period. Not as good as June, but it is an improvement compared to the pre-surge period nonetheless. Here is my standard chart showing civilian casualties in Iraq (go here for details on how these numbers are computed):

http://engram-backtalk.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-i-calculate-casualty-statistics.html

Hi cgreen. The June, July and August numbers are there, just in the wrong place. You need to sort the bars according to data order rather than label order. Click on the thumbnail for this comment in order to see the bar graph you were expecting.