Fun with Excel

Dear Mr. President,

I was reading a CNN.com article about the casualties of the coalition forces in Iraq. Here are the numbers they listed within a paragraph of text:

There have been 2,059 coalition troop deaths, 1,867 Americans, 93 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, one Dane, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Hungarian, 26 Italians, one Kazakh, one Latvian, 17 Poles, one Salvadoran, three Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and 18 Ukrainians.

Within the article you could click on a link to see a graphical representation. Only after immediately noticing that Britain is the largest bar on the chart, my eyes found the title for the chart that reads: "Non-US casualities". I wondered why they didn't include the US in the graph? So I graphed it myself in Excel. It turns out that in a bar chart of the US and the individual non-US casualities, all the non-US countries are nothing more than a raised bump off the base of the chart next to an enormous bar representing the US. It sort of makes you wonder why the CNN.com site would make a graph that was so misleading. It also makes me wonder why our American troops are getting the majority of casualities.

I've included my chart here. (The original chart wouldn't fit, here's a low tech version.)

# Killed
2000
1800 ......$
1600 ......$
1400 ......$
1200 ......$
1000 ......$
800 ........$
600 ........$
400 ........$
200 ........$
0 ............$ $ s - - - - - s - - - - - -*

............US..UK

............................s= Poland and Italy

* See above list for all countries with less than 30 casualities.


Graphically Yours,

LTV