I read some information today that claims that fewer American servicemen are dying per year now than died per year while Clinton was President. That could be true because a lot of military people die in accidents during peacetime. Part of this statistical anomaly could be due to the relative size of the military force. There were far more people in the military during Clinton's Presidency than now. Clinton worked at downsizing the force, which is part of the reason why we couldn't put more troops into the Iraq theater. We have to keep a substantial force available in case trouble breaks out somewhere else.

There was a similar phenomena during the Vietnam War that I used to irritate my liberal friends with. That was murder rate statistics that clearly showed that the murder rate in the US declined during the Vietnam War. The obvious explanation is that a large portion of the age group responsible for most murders was out of the country. The same trend in US murder rate may not apply now because the force in Iraq is smaller, and is comprised of volunteers rather than draftees. (There are some non-politically correct observations that could be made to explain this further.) As I recall deaths from traffic accidents also declined during the Vietnam War, for the same reasons. The marginal death rate of Americans hardly changed during that period, despite the loss of over 50,000 people over eight years in Vietnam.