One thought on “Coalition Deaths in Iraq”

  1. I was incredibly confused when I opened the visualization. First of all, it doesn’t actually describe what the dots are that keeping appearing, so I am left to assume that they are insurgent attacks. That being said, the map itself was somewhat interesting from a war perspective, because I had no idea that there had been that many attacks since 2001 (granted, it only goes until 2007). So that part of the map was eye-opening.

    However, I was extremely disappointed in the fact that Iraqi deaths were not included in the boxes to “check off.” You could see NO middle eastern country as having people fighting in Iraq. This bothered me for a couple of reasons:

    1) The red splotches that you see appear every second are made to instill a sense of sadness/anger that I felt while watching it, because the red seems to make you think of death, specifically, American deaths. I realized that I quickly personalized it and instead of seeing that there were a lot more countries being boxed to see their casualties, I made them all seem like they were Americans.

    2) The fact that Iraqi casualties are not listed proves the one-sided nature of this visualization, as to me at least, it assumes that all of the Iraqis are the ones doing the attacking, never being attacked. This mindset is problematic, especially in warfare, as it is this thought that allows wars to go unquestioned, since we only see ourselves as the victim in the situation, never the aggressor.

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