IED fodder: Due to local economic conditions, lack of educational and employment opportunities, and other pretty obvious reasons, most of the U.S. volunteer army comes from the hinterlands, not the cities. It’s not an uncommon story — young men and women from small towns getting their asses shot off while rich Republicans get richer off the spoils of war.

Demographer William O’Hare and journalist Bill Bishop, working with the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute, which specializes in the overlooked rural areas of our country, have actually crunched the numbers in an important study that has gotten too little attention. Matching a data set from the Department of Defense listing the dead and their hometowns against information from the White House Office of Management and Budget on which counties in this country are metropolitan, they found that the American dead of the Iraq and Afghan Wars do indeed come disproportionately from rural America. Quite startlingly so.

According to their study, the death rate “for rural soldiers (24 per million adults aged 18 to 59) is 60 percent higher than the death rate for those soldiers from cities and suburbs (15 deaths per million).” Of rural areas, Vermont has the highest rate of casualties, followed by Delaware, South Dakota, and Arizona. Only eight of our states have higher urban than rural death rates.

Demographer O’Hare, who himself grew up in the small Michigan town of Flushing, tells Tomdispatch:

“We know that soldiers from rural America are dying at higher rates than those from urban America, strikingly higher, 60 percent higher. We know, from other research, that the rural young join the military at higher rates than those from metropolitan areas. The dearth of opportunity in rural areas simply leaves more young people there with fewer alternatives to the military.

“Dozens of case studies show that opportunities are moving away, part of a long-term shift. The opportunity differential between rural and urban America is probably higher now than at any time in the past. Our study highlights the price some young folks and their families are paying for lack of opportunity in rural America.”

What does this mean? Just over 3,000 Americans have died in Iraq. If the U.S. population is 300 million, then that’s just 0.001 percent of it. Add into this the fact that the American dead come disproportionately from the most forgotten, least attended to parts of our country, from places that often have lost their job bases; consider that many of them were under or unemployed as well as undereducated, that they generally come from struggling, low-income, low-skills areas. Given that we have an all-volunteer military (so that not even the threat of a draft touches other young Americans), you could certainly say that the President’s war in Iraq — and its harm — has been disproportionately felt. If you live in a rural area, you are simply far more likely to know a casualty of the war than in most major metropolitan areas of the country.

No wonder it’s been easy for so many Americans to ignore such a catastrophic war until relatively recently. This might, in a sense, be considered part of a long-term White House strategy, finally faltering, of essentially fighting two significant wars abroad while demobilizing the population at home. When, for instance, soon after the 9/11 attacks the President urged Americans to go to Disney World or, in December 2006, to go “shopping more” to help the economy, he meant it. We were to go on with our normal lives, untouched by his war.