Meet the left-wing talking point of the year:

Army soldiers committed suicide last year at the highest rate in 26 years, and more than a quarter did so while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a new military report. The report, obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its scheduled release Thursday, found there were 99 confirmed suicides among active duty soldiers during 2006, up from 88 the previous year and the highest number since the 102 suicides in 1991 at the time of the Persian Gulf War.

The suicide rate for the Army has fluctuated over the past 26 years, from last year’s high of 17.3 per 100,000 to a low of 9.1 per 100,000 in 2001. . . .

Failed personal relationships, legal and financial problems and the stress of their jobs were factors motivating the soldiers to commit suicide, according to the report.

“In addition, there was a significant relationship between suicide attempts and number of days deployed” in Iraq, Afghanistan or nearby countries where troops are participating in the war effort, it said. The same pattern seemed to hold true for those who not only attempted, but succeeded in killing themselves.

The important thing to remember here, however, is this statistician’s maxim: Correlation does not always suggest causation.  Just because suicide rates among soldiers are high now during a time of war is no reason to suggest that the war itself is causing it.  As Dr. James Joyner points out, the highest suicide rate ever among soldiers took place with the peace-time Army of 1980 under Jimmy Carter:

When I heard this story on NPR this morning as I was awakening, my initial reaction was that it’s not surprising that it’s been 26 years since the numbers were this high, since that was the last time the Army was engaged in a sustained war. But, of course, my groggy math was off by a decade: 26 years ago from 2006 is 1980, the last year of the Carter administration and a full seven years since our departure from Vietnam. Which means that, despite legitimate concern about suicides rising during this war (see here and here for stories from 2003), the rate was actually lower than it was during the peacetime Army of 1980.

During the intervening period, the high has been 17.3 per 100,000 and the low 9.1 per 100,000. It’s not only conceivable but probable that the fluctuation is essentially random, having more to do with the vagaries of the personal lives of the soldiers than what the Army is doing.

Rather than simply working off of just yearly suicide rates, it’d be better to match those dates up with dates of US conflict.  If, over the course of time, suicide rates spiked during conflicts and died off during peace time I think we could say that the correlation probably suggests causation (pending other evidence).  But given that military suicide rates seem to spike at intervals that have nothing to do with the wars or engagements our military is involved in I just don’t think this data indicates much of anything.

That won’t stop this data from being used as anti-war propaganda, of course, but whatever.