October 16, 2006

Collateral Damage in Iraq

Six hundred thousand is a lot of people. There are just under 600,000 people living within the District of Columbia city limits and just over 600,000 people living in the state of Vermont. Six hundred thousand people could fill the Rose Bowl more than six times or Madison Square Garden more than twenty times.

And according to a recently-published study done by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 600,000 also represents the approximate number of Iraqis who have died violent deaths since the American invasion in March 2003.

Six hundred thousand is a lot of people.

The official finding of the study is that over 600,000 more Iraqis have died since the invasion than “would have been expected in a non-conflict situation.” The Johns Hopkins figure, reached by studying the mortality rate of a broad cross-section of the Iraq community rather than relying on reporting from morgues, hospitals, or governments, is significantly higher than previous estimates from the U.S. military, the U.N. and various human rights organizations. The standard of error puts the number anywhere from 426,369 to 793,663.

President Bush, who has avoided talking much about the number of Iraqis dead, has publicly acknowledged that as many as 50,000 Iraqis may have died since the American invasion. When told of the 600,000 figure, the President said of the report that “the methodology is pretty well discredited.”

The same, of course, could be said of the President’s various rationales for beginning the war in the first place. The alleged terrorism connection and the threat of WMDs have been disproved. Even democracy promotion is taking a back seat after Hamas’s electoral victory in the Palestinian territories. The Iraq war is increasingly only justifiable as a humanitarian war – an effort to rid Iraq of the Hussein dictatorship and allow Iraqis to determine their own futures. Even assuming that the 600,000 figure is too high, even one fourth of that number of deaths seems terribly un-humanitarian. One hundred and fifty thousand, after all, is a lot of people.

Even though the root cause of the massive Iraqi chaos and suffering is the continued and destructive presence of elements desperate to spread violence and fear, the loss of Iraqi life is in part an American responsibility. The American failure to adequately plan for the protection of the very civilians its war was ostensibly waged to benefit reveals how low a priority Iraqi life was given in the run-up to the war. The result of that failure is tragic. Whatever the precise number, scores of thousands of human beings are no longer alive as a result of a life-or-death decision made in Washington.

So long as the American calculus discounts or ignores the collateral damage caused by American actions, we will continue to isolate ourselves and sow resentment around the world. It is difficult to believe a government that claims it is engaged in a humanitarian activity when the human toll of that activity is so high.

American credibility is just one more casualty of the Iraq war.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can we consider the source in which this figure comes from?
We are looking at a survey that randomly selected 33 households, asked about births and deaths, and then magically calculated the number of casualties. Wouldn’t a body count show more accuracy for a death toll count? Even Les Roberts, PhD, an associate with the Bloomberg School of Public Health said, “Our findings need to be independently verified with a larger sample group. However, I think our survey demonstrates the importance of collecting civilian casualty information during a war and that it can be done”. I find it hard to believe such a massive number when three other sources report findings that are almost identical- the Brookings Institution 60,000, Iraq’s Health Ministry 50,000, and the White House 30,000. It is also somewhat interesting that Iraq, the country in which we are having the war, reports 550,000 less fatalities than some research institution here in the U.S. Why is it that liberals thrive on negativity and go to the extent of publishing inaccurate figures to persuade the American people to resent our own President? God forbid we had done nothing in Iraq and Saddam would have free reign to commit more genocidal killings and suppress the Iraqi people. God bless this country and President Bush.

Uneven Kiel said...

Clarification on the facts (in response to anonymous poster's message) - the study was not of 33 households, but of 1,849 households containing over 12,000 Iraqis in 47 different locations. This was not a ragtag guess.

Second, in terms of credibility, it is worth noting that the pre-war estimate arrived at by using this technique reached the exact same result as the US government estimate for pre-war death rates in Iraq (5.5 deaths per 1000 people per year). That does not mean the number is correct, but shows that the method is not automatically unreliable.

I don't disagree that getting rid of Saddam Hussein and preventing his "free reign to commit more genocidal killins and suppress the Iraqi people" was a good thing. What I disagree with is a plan that is so short-sighted as to ignore the death toll on the people we are ostensibly fighting to free. To me, that short-sightedness says that the war was not undertaken for the benefit of the Iraqi people and claims to the contrary must address the fact that as a result of the war many Iraqis have died - whatever the "real" number is.

Anonymous said...

I find in interesting that those who are so vehemently pro-Bush find it necessary to hide behind the veil of anonymity to espouse their views