I'm getting a tad tired of blogging about press bias & the search for context in reportage from Iraq and made a somewhat conscious decision to steer away from this topic.   But this report from the ever-excellent Strategypage.com was just too good to pass up -

IRAQ: Baghdad is Safer than Washington, DC

June 21, 2004: The anti-government violence in Iraq is causing a annualized death rate of 15 per 100,000 population for terrorist activities alone. That compares to a murder rate in the United States of 5.6 per 100,000. European nations have an average rate of about four per 100,000, while Russia is 20 per 100,000. Some nations are particularly violent. South Africa has a murder rate of 59, and neighboring Namibia is 45. Colombia, in South America, was over 50 a few years ago, but is now down to the 30s because a crackdown on armed militias. The Middle East tends of have low murder rates, with Turkey having a rate of 2.3. Israel also had a rate of 2.3, until the Palestinians began their terrorism campaign in late 2000. The deaths from suicide bombings and other attacks doubled Israel's murder rate to about 4 per 100,000, although that has been coming down in the past year.

But Iraq has become accustomed to a high murder rate. Saddam's police forces were the cause of many murders, and as far back as the 1970s, the official murder rate was 12 per 100,000. The coalition forces and Iraqi security forces have gotten the non-terrorist murder rate down to about five per 100,000. This, combined with the deaths caused by terrorists, produces a rate of about 20 per year. The murder rate in Washington, DC, is over 60 per 100,000.

Now a thorough diet of NYT / CBC / BBC / AP / whomever certainly wouldn't have left you with this impression... 

I call attention, once again, to the impact that reportage like this would have on the morale of Iraqi insurgents whose explicit goal is to create an image of murderous chaos in the streets of Baghdad.   These guys are fighting & dying at a terrible rate today just to maintain their current level of barbarism (other reports on strategypage.com point to a casualty rate among the extremists of several times their rate of casualties inflicted).   BUT, according to this report, they need to crank it up (and thus expose themselves) 4x more just to get the Iraqi capital's murder rate up to the same level as the US's.