Contact
Lifestream
Iraqi Death Toll Exceeds 600,000
October 11th, 2006 at 08:22 Björn Hallberg
America’s murderous cannons roar. The US has now — directly and indirectly — violently killed more people than Saddam in Iraq, and in less time too.
This study, “The Human Cost of the War in Iraq,” puts civilian fatalities at 426,369 to 793,663 but gives a 95% certainty to the figure of 601,027.
Human Rights Watch has estimated Saddam Hussein’s regime killed 250,000 to 290,000 people over 20 years.
And this is just an updated estimate of violent deaths since 2003. The fatalities as a result of the breakdown and wilful destruction of infrastructure, not to mention the more long-term environmental impact of depleted uranium and other pollutants obviously do not factor in. Even if the violence stopped today, people would still be dying unnecessarily for a very long time. And there isn’t a goddamn thing that the US has accomplished so far that could even begin to justify this appalling loss of human life. These poor souls can’t even claim that they snuffed it under the banner of security or a meaningful democracy.
One should of course not forget history and hence make sure to add this to the context of the estimated number of overall fatalities caused by US foreign policy since 1945. However, like the (notoriously apologetic) “Iraq Body Count” index and despite their startling numbers, these tallies are just educated, moderate guesses based on commonly available data. Had America’s foreign policy been measured by the same modern, scientific standard as the above study, the figure could very well surpass 20 million deaths since 1945 alone.
Entry 647 filed under: Middle East. This entry was posted 1 year, 12 months ago. RSS feed for comments on this post.
Most of those deaths in Iraq, I would say the clear majority of them are deaths caused by terrorist insurgents killing other Iraqi civilians. I know the arguement is that, “well if we were not there in the first place, then they would not have died”. A valid arguement, but you do have to go back to the very beginning and let your mind remember the 90’s, when Sadam was completely defying the world community, by kicking out weapons inspectors on more than one occasion. The reason we went into Iraq is the reason we must stay for the time being. I believe that in modern times, it is not just Americas boarders that must be protected. We are such a force on the national stage, and our economy and influence is so huge, and important, in this world, that we have to protect our intrests abroad. We may be loosing lives right now, but just imagine a nuclear divise in the hands of terrorists, yes just imagine 2-4 of those same devises. Terrorists are morally wrong, they simply kill indiscrimanently, so we must protect our interests. It’s not about wether Iraq is “part of the war on terror” it is about us winning there, and worldwide, so that terrorists never ever get a bomb in there hands, because that bomb will end up killing as many people as they can.
The problems with this “study” are many, but you’ll ignore that.
likwidshoe: I call bullshit on that last “article”, the site and the author. I can only surmise by the first argument, which is the only one I’ll waste my valuable time commenting on, that the author feels insurgents are somehow in a special category. I guess the myth of the foreign, numerous and professional insurgents has to be maintained. In reality of course, most of the so called insurgents were locals fed up with being brutalized and raped. A great deal of them were actual civilians that had their names mentioned during torturous interrogations or just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. A great many died because of sectarian violence, which we know has been played on by the policy makers. We do know that the neocon trend setters who planned and plotted through the 90s explicitly wanted to weaken Iraq through the use of religious divides. It makes sense in a Machiavellian kind of way and as such the plot isn’t particularly novel. Even if one subtracts all sorts of phony American group definitions — police, insurgents and whatnot — to lower the number presented in the above study, it would still fall far beyond the 30.000 figure now accepted by pro-war sources. Plus, just as the figure is inclined to lump people together, it also only focuses on violence per se. It would be no surprise to me if just as many people died from non-violent causes in the last couple of years and will continue to die from the ravaged nuclear-chemical wasteland that America has transformed Iraq into. And of course, America already has half a million to a million Iraqi lives on its conscience since the brutal sanctions during the 90s.
Emery: If I had wanted the official propaganda I would have gotten a windup George W doll. The “American interests” argument is worth no more than Germany goose stepping into Poland or Britain seizing the Indian subcontinent. But it is confirming, in a roundabout way, the economic-imperialistic theory of foreign policy and interventionism.
It is also ironic — speaking of the need to “fight over there” AS WELL — that America doesn’t protect its borders very well. See the lack of a proper littoral navy for instance in comparison to its huge blue water navy. In fact, the American military in general specializes in projecting force far, far from its own borders, which is of course also rather telling.
As for “imagining” nuclear weapons I could dream up any number of contingencies but I wont. Don’t use events that have not yet been written, and are frankly unlikely statistically speaking, to mend the mistakes of the past. It reads like a Star Trek plot.
As for Saddam being out of line in the 1990s, well for starters, the inspectors you mention got booted because they were infiltrated by American agents who most importantly were gathering intelligence, specifically on Saddam’s personal guard and his habits. Is it any surprise Saddam failed to cooperate? Of course it turned out to be a win-win propaganda situation for the US, which could throw a fit when Iraq “tried to hand pick” inspectors for the mission. It’s all about spinning the news.
Plus, and this is the same fact of the matter that never gets through, even if one accepted the framework of the “war on terrorism”, “terrorism”, “9-11″ and whatnot as true — which I don’t — the “terrorists” would still be blowback from a long history of American foreign intervention that is frankly well deserved and should happen more often. Don’t act as if “terrorism” is mindless, indiscriminate or mind-boggling because it isn’t. Try to change your ways, starting here and now, and you’ll be spared the blowback ten or twenty years from now. Try to not support autocrats, like Saddam, and you wont have to deal with them when the relationship turns sour.
Björn Hallberg - in other words, you call bullshit on it because you assume that the author makes a special category for insurgents. Nevermind the arguments made against the small cluster samples and the admitted bias of the researchers.
Then you add in the deaths from the sanctions as if that were America’s fault. You are completely forgetting the whole “Oil for Food” scam.
…the “terrorists” would still be blowback from a long history of American foreign intervention that is frankly well deserved and should happen more often.
How surprising. You’re against America and make excuses for Islamic terrorism.
I believe I’ve been over this before. The sample is reasonable. Experts, who actually do surveys agree:
http://www.sitnews.us/1006news/101706/101706_shns_iraqi_dead.html
Interestingly, if one does not buy into this number, then apparently no one has died in Darfur or Congo either.
Needless to say, the bias in this case is that the researchers entered into the study believing that human lives matter and that Iraqi lives matter as much as American lives. And that one actually counts deaths in a war. All three of which the US does not believe. So, who is biased? And is it more or less biased to believe the statements from one side of the conflict as opposed to external observers, opinionated as they may be? Some would readily believe the information relayed by the party which is now in the court of public opinion for the direct and indirect slaughter of 426,369 to 793,663 people. It’s strange how no one was eager to trust Saddam back in the day and the figures he may have given on deaths during his rule. Just suggesting that we should have trusted Saddam would have been deemed preposterous. Yet here we are, with some clinging to the falsehoods of the perpetrator of atrocities. Some double standards that — just as in the case of survey techniques.
I’m sorry but “oil for food” was no scandal. Not compared to slow and calculated genocide. And people were still dying before, during and after the UN program was set up. If America hadn’t pushed for pointless and brutal sanctions, more than half a million would still be alive and the UN wouldn’t have had to implement the corruption-prone program (which in the end was a win-win situation for the US as it could “prove” that the UN was dysfunctional). A program, by the way, which America also broke by having top level companies dealing with Iraq if I recall the Volker report correctly. In fact, America spearheaded the corruption and government officials must have known. In any case, bribes and sanctions busting does not magically wash away the blood from America’s hands and to even hint such a thing suggests a shrivelled sense of ethics.
As for “terrorism” it’s a free market right? I can only deplore that so far, only a few genuine groups out of the middle-east have really acted against the American Empire. For all the evils that America has presided over, you’d think that more people would be craving blood as it were. But like I said, the “terrorism” that you fit into the term and into your narrow view of the world would surely be a psyop so it’s a moot point really.
The sample size was not reasonable.
But you don’t care. You’ve already bought into it and no amount of logic will shake you from the blame America tree.
Thank you for that fair and balanced piece of journalism from the infamous Steven E. Moore, professional mouthpiece of the Republican party. But I am nevertheless impressed that you could muster even one fascist-minded American apologist to back up these wild accusations.
To conclude the matter once and for all:
Les Roberts responds to Steven E Moore
“[...] the sample size was not too small and they did collect demographic data”