December 18, 2005
The civilian death toll.
This graph compares the numbers of civilians who have died in various recent conflicts. The contrasting numbers for the Iraq War and the politically motivated killings under Saddam Hussein, whom the war ousted from power, are very stark. The contrasting numbers for the ouster of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Afghanistan civil war are much more extreme. There are numbers too for the conflicts where the United States has not intervened -- Rwanda, Darfur. We can only speculate what the total number would have been if there were two bars on the graph for each of those conflicts, one for the civil war and one for the intervention. By the same token, we cannot know what the length of the bar for Iraq and Afghanistan would be if there had been no intervention and therefore no second bar splitting up the total number.
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It would also be interesting to see bars representing lives lost in the war to which so many of Bush's opponents eagerly compare the Iraq intervention.
It's been interesting to me how that Lancet study figure of 100,000 civilian deaths, with "the majority" coming as a result of Coalition actions, has been dropped not only from the mainstream media but even from most anti-war pieces I read. It's as if everyone finally tacitly agreed that it simply made no sense, but of course it did its damage at the time and also still exists at some kind of subconscious level for the anti-war-minded.
When it came out, I e-mailed one of the authors of the study, and just related my skepticism, which was based primarily on math: it would have meant something like 200-250 civilian deaths every single day since the war began, at that point. Since even anti-war writing hardly ever reported an incident at that level - the peak of Fallujah fighting produced several hundred civilan deaths, for example, going from memory - I just did not buy the argument that we were seeing the result of lack of reporting. It made no common-sense sense.
He wrote back and urged me to be careful with concluding figures like those being reported, while at the same time defending the sampling methodology which he said was quite standard and common. So it seemed to me he was trying to haveit both ways.
I wrote him back wondering why he didn't have a press conference saying people shouldn't really trust the 100,000 figure, since he kind of said that to me, and also saying I detected a hint that even he knew there was a basic logic problem wiht the figure. He never wrote back.
I was curious about Saddam's war with Iran, which the Times curiously omitted from it's chart. According to Wikipedia, the death toll for that conflict was a very round 1 million dead. I'm sure the plus/minus on this number far exceeds the toll for the current conflict. Link
A well known technology columnist once e-mailed me a personal description of Iranian children marching across a battle field and being mowed down by Iraqi guns. The Iranians felt this would harm the Iraqi will to fight. Strangely, he gave this in the context of reasons why we shouldn't have invaded Iraq.
One hundred thousand Iraqis were executed every year under Saddam. Shortly after our liberation, the new Iraqi government found a list of Iraqis who were scheduled to die at the hands of Saddam’s butchers in the next 12 months.
That list contained 77,000 names. The liberation of Iraq has saved over 250,000 lives in the past three years.
Be interested in a link on that list, Jake.
paulfrommpls:
Here is another problem with that 100,000 civilian deaths number. In war, for every person killed there are over 4 people injured. For 100,000 to be killed there has to be 400,000 to 500,000 injured people in hospital beds right now. It would also mean that the streets would be lined with hospital beds. The truth is that hospitals are not even filled to capacity.
The more accurate and more widely accepted number is 10,000 civilian deaths. 90% are attributable to car bombs, Al Qaida executions and suicide bombers. These number are supported by hospital admissions.
Pi, the time period posted for Iraq's internal violence is 1988-1991, only three years. So in Iraq's case, the time periods are comparable.
It's deceptive to compare civilian deaths in Iraq during peacetime under Saddam Hussein with those during a war started by the US, or to compare either of those with the current civil disturbance in Darfur or the unfortunate events in Rawanda.
The reason it's deceptive is that it implies that the US is somehow less responsible for some of these tragedies than for others.
Saddam Hussein was a tyrant installed and supported entirely by the United States — why do you think he had all those US tanks and missiles and airplanes? Why did his army have American rifles? He invaded Sudan in our interests, and destroyed the factory where they made the medicine, and everybody died. Everybody. The conflict in Sudan is, like other problems in the Islamic world, an entirely predictable result of the ongoing injustice in Palestine, as well as a perfectly predictable reaction to BushCo's open contempt for international law: Nations never behaved that way until the US set a bad example. The blood is entirely on our hands. In addition, Bush's absurd refusal to take responsibility for the sacking of Troy — another absolutely predictable result of American foreign policy — simply proves once again that character is destiny, and Bush has no destiny. Er, no character, I mean. He has no character. Because it's his destiny, to have, to not have any character, is his problem. Is what I'm saying. And that's destiny.
These are the darkest days of our nation's history. The eagles are coming home to roost, in one basket, singing their swan-song, and BushCo has burned the barn door behind us. Who will think of the children? When the Founders wisely wrote Rove vs. Wade, the bedrock and capstone of our liberties, they displayed their wise contempt for the cynical criminal Rove, and they were thinking of the children. We can do no less.
"why do you think he had all those US tanks and missiles and airplanes? Why did his army have American rifles?"
Have you any reputable source for any of those allegations?
Eric, John---read his post again :)
mcg — I see the confusion. They probably didn't realize they were reading a DNC policy paper...
Thank you for a link to a great and relevant graphic.
I wish there was also an avg deaths/year dotted line on each bar.
I also liked the Nicuagura inclusion -- wish there'd been room for Pinochet & Castro, too.
The stupid Lancet 2,000 - 100 000 - 200 000 (somewhere in between) essentially meaningless number is an embarrassment to the Left.
If Bush's Iraq war isn't a HUGE success, what is?
It is interesting to also see who is causing the civilian deaths in Iraq:
http://eurota.blogspot.com/2005/07/iraq-story-that-doesnt-fit-lefts-hate.html
Perspective is a lost art!
I did a quickie calculation on deaths/year and came up with this ordering (min==>max):
Afghan against Taliban: 3750/yr
Nicaragua: 5833/yr
Iraq War (current):10,000/yr
Iraq Internal: 16,363/yr
Afghan/Soviet war: 41,667/yr
Bosnia: 50,000/yr
Darfur: 60,333/yr
Rwanda: 2,000,000/yr
One could also weight this against total population, although I'm not sure this would accomplish a whole lot. It'd be a different metric, but I'm not sure what it would really mean.
Anthony, how did you come up with your Iraq Internal number? It appears to be off.
I get 45,000 per year, based on the graph.
Leave it to an American to try and spindocter her way out of the shame of her country. Trying to avert our attention to conficts that pale in comparison to what the U.S. has done to Iraq. Some say that the death toll is too high, that 250 civilians must have died each day to reach such an astronamical number. This sounds far fetched, but in actual fact it is too low a figure. IBC(Iraqi Body Count) counts only the civilian deaths that are announced in the Iraqi media(T.V. and newspapers). As one of my sources states, it seems unlikely that every or even most individual civilian casualties would be mentioned in the media. The staff at IBC claims fluency only in English, and as IBC states, "We have not made use of Arabic or other non English language sources, except where these have been published in English. ... It is possible that our count has excluded some victims as a result."
I know it's hard for this simplton to understand, but thousands upon thousands of people died from worsening health and environmental conditions directly related to the conflict that began in 2003, U.S. and Iraqi public health researchers said(CNN).
If you want a realistic death toll to date, you're looking at 655,000(CNN) poeple.
The death toll in Iraq has reached over 1 million civilians and the number of refugees went over 2.5 million. The number of injured of people is in the millions. So many people died slow deaths because they could not reach functioning hospitals (US bombed electrical grids and destroyed ability for hospitals to function).
The Pentagon has officially stated that they do not do bodycounts of Iraqi victims but every single US casualty (either injured or dead) is tracked meticulously. This alone should suffice for any civilized person to realize that there is something deeply wrong with this.
There is not a single family in Iraq that has not lost one of their family members or who has not suffered so deeply from this injuste invasion of revenge and destruction.
The invasion of Iraq is a war crime and is the bloodiest coup d'etat ever known in the Middle East.
US government officials who launched this horrible war must be tried for war crimes.
It is troubling that the author of this blog is trying to justify this bloodbath and to minimize the death toll by quoting sources from the invaders themselves.
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