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[Girlinhat]

I seriously doubt you're getting another to-hit roll when using two weapons.  More likely, it's the relatively rare parry/counter that's increasing the dual-wield survival rate.  This makes dual-wielding slightly better than single-wielding, but still makes weapon+shield much preferred due to the native block rate of shields.  Parry/counter happens much much less frequently than shield blocks.

[dr_random]

Take, for instance, the hollywood ninja.  They dress in all black and run around with a sheath over one shoulder throwing ninja stars and daggers.  Dressing in all black would get you spotted pretty quickly.  "Who's that guy?  He looks weird dressed like that!" 

It's a cliché. I think a good spy always makes an effort to disguise him/herself. That black stuff must be for the night action and the average Westerner for realizing that the Ninja has an appearance.
As for weapons: The unskilled army is in my eyes da 'blunt' wielderz. No expertise in stabbing the soft bellies? Use blunt! Makes good crashin' 'eadz. I like the concept of 'blunt' - imagine the funny noise when the mace hits the helmet.
Well, my fun was utterly runined when the bronze colossus came: ".... hits the Bronze Colossus' right lower leg with his silver warhammer, DENTING it." Yeah, nice dentists they were. But I still stick to it: Is the enemy armoured up? Nevermind, some impact force will still force him down.

[Valdrax]

I seriously doubt you're getting another to-hit roll when using two weapons.  More likely, it's the relatively rare parry/counter that's increasing the dual-wield survival rate.

Possibly.  I'd need to figure out a way to dig that all out of the logs and run some numbers on parries to compare, but as far as I can tell from setting large armies at each other, the survival rate is purely a matter of having more allies able to stay in the fight after losing an arm.

A bunch of one-armed dwarves with axes v. a bunch of one-armed dwarves with just shields or empty hands is a foregone conclusion if they're both wearing comparable armor.

[Girlinhat]

Relatively easy way of arena testing the parry rate:
Copy the raws for the sword (or whatever weapon) and give it a different name.  For instance, Sword1 and Sword2.  Then equip a 1 and 2 for the creature.  The combat reports should say "and parried by the Iron Sword2" and let you figure out how they're using their gear.

[MarcAFK]

The dual wielders probably only fare better against the single wielders simply because injury to sword arm is a fairly common occurence and it's nice to have a backup.

[Eddren]

Nice to have a spare?! You elf, that's what your teeth are for!

[Iapetus]

If AI-controlled fortress-mode dwarves fight the same way as human-controlled adventurer-mode dwarves, then carrying multiple weapons won't give you multiple attacks per "round".

What it would give you is more opportunities for the RNG to give good attack options.  (For example, one weapon might give the option to make a "difficult, not-square" hit to the head, but the other might allow an "easier, very square" hit to the same place.

That said, I have heard that holding multiple weapons gives an overal penalty to hit, and my experiences seem to support this.

The other potential advantages of carrying two weapons are that if one gets stuck in, you can still use the other one without having to extract it first, and that you can carry different types of weapons for dealing with different types of enemy.   But  I've rarely seen fortress-mode combat reports where weapons stay stuck in for long, and giving each soldier several weapons seems like excessive weight and cost for a problem that could more easily be solved by just having mixed squads.  (And it becomes even worse if carrying multiple weapons can give a significant to-hit penalty).