Fwd: from Juan Cole: 250,000 Civilians Dead in Bush's ...

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

From: Juan Cole <jricole@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Jan 10, 2008 1:12 AM

... A new World Health Organization study estimates the excess numbers
of civilians killed in violence in Iraq from April 2003 through June
2006 at between 101,000 and 224,000. They settled on 151,000 or so as
the most likely number. This number is an estimate of how many people
died of violence beyond what you would have expected from the
2001-2002 baseline. Violent deaths increased 17 times over once the
Bush administration invaded the country. As I read the AP article, the
study actually found more like 302,000 excess deaths, but only
attributed 151,000 to violence. It seems to me possible that some of
the other 151,000 excess deaths could also be chalked up to the US
invasion and the reaction to it, even if they are not violent. There
have been disease outbreaks, shortages of medicine, poor medical care,
displacement of populations to tent cities with poor sanitation, and
difficulties in traveling to distant hospitals. Bears looking into.

The Lancet study found 600,000 excess deaths from violence. I'm not
qualified to make a methodological judgment as to the virtues of the
two studies. I don't think the validity of the Lancet estimate should
just be dismissed by journalists or bloggers, for the same reason. If
someone is a specialist in the public health field and a whiz at
statistics, then I'd be interested in a judgment from that person. But
I would point out that the last time Bush admitted his war had killed
civilians, he quoted the figure of 30,000, and we can definitely
dismiss such tiny numbers as woefully inaccurate. Bush has to face up
to what he has done.

Passive gathering of death statistics from newspapers, which always
misses a lot of unreported deaths, such as at the Iraq Body Count
site, came up with 47,668 civilian deaths in the same period. IBC is
now up to about 84,000 civilian deaths. If the 3 to 1 discrepancy
between reported and unreported deaths visible in the WHO study held
steady, that would take us to a further 100,000 or so deaths in the
past 18 months, and to roughly 250,000 excess deaths through violence
since the war began.

There is also the question of how many Iraqis have sustained
significant or crippling injuries from the same violence that has left
so many dead. For US troops, the ratio is nearly 4,000 killed to
nearly 10,000 severely wounded, or 2.5 times. If the same rate held
true for Iraqi civilians in the war, and if it is true that 250,000
have by now been killed, it would equal 625,000 severely wounded.

[the ratio for US troops wouldn't apply to Iraqi civilians, since the
latter don't wear armor. It's armor that raises the US wounded/dead
ratio.]

One of the arguments warmongers gave for overthrowing Saddam Hussein
was that his regime was responsible for the violent deaths of some
300,000 civilians between 1968 and 2003. That estimate now appears
exaggerated, since the number of bodies in mass graves has not borne
it out. But what is tragic is that in 4 1/2 short years, a foreign
military occupation has unleashed killing on a scale achieved by the
murderous Saddam Hussein regime only over decades. Bush did not kill
all those people directly, of course, but he did indirectly cause them
to be killed, since these are excess deaths beyond what you would have
expected if there had been no invasion and occupation.

I am often struck by how clueless the American public is to the vast
destruction we have wrought on Iraq and its people, directly or
indirectly. It strikes me as a bitter joke that 4 million are
displaced, often facing hunger and disease, and the rightwing
periodicals and presidential candidates are talking about how the
"surge" has "turned things around." For whom? How many orphans have we
created? How many widows? How many people who weep and cry every night
while trying to fall asleep on straw mats? I estimate on the basis of
a UN study of refugees in Syria that as many as 600,000 or 700,000
Baghdadis were ethnically cleansed from the capital under the nose of
the American troops implementing the surge. There is an old Chinese
proverb, "Children throw stones at frogs in jest, but the frogs die in
earnest."

Bush has gutted American civil liberties, and turned us into a hateful
nation of spies, torturers, bigots, and colonialists occupying someone
else's country. (See Tomdispatch.com for an impassioned argument on
how this was accomplished.) And he has managed to unleash a maelstrom
of violence in the Middle East that has wiped out the population of a
medium-sized city. Surveying civilian deaths in Iraq is like walking
through Lincoln, Nebraska, after it was hit by a neutron bomb, with
everyone dead. Everyone.

--
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) --  Karl, paraphrasing Dante.