Who's Tracking Casualties in Iraq? High School Teacher, Alum Joel Wing

PALM BEACH POST -- “It was a sad moment for tracking the violence and security situation in Iraq,” said Wing, who immediately fired back on his nine-year-old blog, Musings on Iraq. “The Iraqi Joint Operations Command said that those figures were exaggerated without giving any correction of its own,” Wing wrote, noting that the U.N.’s decision “will create a huge gap in keeping up with the cost of the war.” Someone would have to fill it. For many who have followed the war in Iraq and the number of lives it has claimed, that would be Wing. The 47-year-old teacher at Oakland Technical High School has never been to Iraq, but he has become one of the go-to sources for reliable data and trends on the violent toll of the 14-year-old conflict in the troubled country. Wing, a native of Berkeley who earned a Bachelor’s and Master’s in International Relations at San Francisco State University, then a teaching credential at nearby Mills College, has been teaching English and social studies at Oakland Technical High School since 1995.