Making the US Military Suicide Rate A Left/Right Issue

UPDATE: I just saw a report on this on Anderson Cooper 360 today and of course they slanted and twisted the facts as well.  For one the suicide rate of 19.9 per 100,000 soldiers in Iraq, CNN said was higher than the average civilian suicide rate.  Yes it is higher than the average suicide rate, but it is not higher than average suicide rate of the civilains of the same age group and gender of those who committed suicide as General Kiley pointed out in the below Reuters article, but CNN conveniently left this information out of their Anderson Cooper piece.  They did make sure to harp on how they believe the suicide rate is going up due to increased deployments even though General Kiley in the below Reuters piece says the statistics don’t support it, especially when the average suicide rate of the last two years when combined is lower than the 2003 level, which of course CNN conveniently didn’t mention at all either.

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The media is running big headlines like this recently, US Soldiers’ Suicide Rate in Iraq Doubles in 2005.  Sounds pretty grim right?  Well let’s look at the actual facts:

Twenty-two U.S. soldiers in Iraq took their own lives in 2005, a rate of 19.9 per 100,000 soldiers. In 2004, the rate was 10.5 per 100,000 and in 2003, the year of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the figure was 18.8 per 100,000.

The figures cover U.S. Army soldiers only. They do not include members of other U.S. military services in Iraq such as the Marine Corps.

Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, the Army’s surgeon general, cautioned against overinterpreting the figures, saying suicide rates tended to fluctuate from year to year.

“We think that the numbers are so rare to begin with that it’s very hard to make any kind of interpretation,” he said at a news conference to present a study on the mental health of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

“We have not made a connection between the stress on the force and some massive or even significant increase in suicides,” he said.

While every suicide was one too many, Kiley said, the suicide rate among soldiers was lower than the average among civilians of the same age and gender.

So the truth comes out at the very end of the article.  Basically the minute number of soldiers who did commit suicide this year in the Army while stationed in Iraq is actually near identical to the 2003 number and if you take an average of the suicide rate from the last year than the overall number is actually much lower than the 2003 number.  Then the article concludes with the information that if your kid joins the military and goes to Iraq he/she is less likely to commit suicide compared to if he/she just stayed at home where the civilian percentage is higher.  Yet, the big headline is the rise in suicides in the military.

Why doesn’t the MSM come up with a fairer headline of, US Army Suicide Rate Rises, But Still Lower than Civilian Rate.  Aren’t these fairer headlines?  However, the MSM is not about fairness, it is about framing left/right issues and the military suicide rate is something they are trying to frame as soldiers committing suicide because of too many deployments because that is what the left wants you to believe even though the statistics do not support it.  I can guarantee you one thing, if the suicide rate goes down next year, you will hear nothing about it.  It is just like with recruiting numbers, as long as the military continues to make it’s recruiting numbers you will hear nothing about it, but if the military misses it’s recruiting mark for one month than it will be front page news.