The Rural War Urban/Rural Divide

Which American communities pay the highest price for the war in Iraq? A look at the demographics of soldiers killed reveals that Iraq is not the war of any one race or region. Rather, it is rural America's war. It's not that Iraqi insurgents are singling out rural soldiers, or that commanders are putting them at particular risk. Rather, the armed forces themselves must be disproportionately drawn from rural communities - a fact not immediately discernible from recruitment data, which report the race, age and education of recruits, but not their home counties. This is above all an economics story….The higher rate of deaths from rural counties likely reflects sparse opportunities for young people in those places.

Support for the President Bush is generally highest in America’s rural regions. If Iraq disintegrates into civil war with the U.S. caught in the middle, will rural America turn against the war? Will the war in Iraq come to be seen as an unwinnable war, and if so, will rural America become distrustful of a government that led us into such a war? More than half of those polled in a recent survey believe the Bush administration deliberately misled the American public about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, a 12 per cent increase in two years

Leo Brown | July 31, 2005 | Comment on This Post (2 so far) Permalink: The Rural War Urban/Rural Divide

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