http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/65634/
Iraq's Bloody Toll: History Repeats Itself
By Conn Hallinan, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted October 19, 2007.
In 1258, the Mongols took Baghdad, murdered its inhabitants, burned its
libraries, and ravished its lands. The Bush administration has done the same,
but hidden it behind a smoke screen of lies.
The great 19th-century Tory Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli once remarked
there were three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. It is a
dictum the Bush administration has taken to heart when it comes to totaling up
the carnage in Iraq: If you don't like the numbers, just change them; and when
in doubt, look 'em in the eye and lie.
For instance, according to the Department of Defense (DOD), the United States
does not track civilian casualties. As former commander General Tommy Franks
put it, "We don't do body counts."
But testimony in the recent trial of U.S. Army snipers from the First
Battalion of the 501 Infantry regiment indicated the generals indeed do body
counts. In a July hearing at Fort Liberty, Iraq, Sgt. Anthony G. Murphy said he
and other snipers felt "an underlying tone" of disappointment from their
commanders when they didn't rack up big body counts.
"It just kind of felt like, 'What are you guys doing wrong out there?'" he
testified. When the snipers started setting traps to lure in unsuspecting
Iraqis, the kill ratios went up and the commanders, he said, were pleased.
The choreography the Bush administration does around casualties is aimed at
creating a dance of lies and disinformation to cover up one of the worst
humanitarian crises to strike the Middle East since the Mongols sacked Baghdad.
That is not an overstatement.
A recent poll by the British agency Opinion Research Business (ORB) found
that the war may have killed more than one million people, a toll that
surpasses the 800,000 killed in the Rwandan genocide. The ORB used "excess
mortality" as its measure, that is, deaths over and above mortality figures
from the past.
The Grim Numbers
Trying to figure out the butcher bill in Iraq is an uphill task.
For instance, according to the London-based organization Iraq Body Count, by
March of this year, civilian deaths stood at 65,160, although the organization
noted that 2007 has seen "the worst violence against civilians in Iraq since
the invasion." The conservative Brookings Institute's Iraq Index posts slightly
higher figures, and the United Nations higher still.
The Iraq Interior Ministry is highly critical of the UN's conclusion that
34,000 Iraqis died in 2006, calling the figures "inaccurate" and "unbalanced,"
but refuses to release its own figures. And the only sum the Bush
administration has ever come up with is when the president commented to the
press in December 2005 that the number of Iraqis killed was "30,000, more or
less."
The first serious statistical investigation of the war's impact was a survey
by Johns Hopkins University published in the British medical magazine, The
Lancet. According to the study, from the March 2003 invasion through September
2006, the number of deaths due to the war was 654, 965 Over half of those were
women and children. The Johns Hopkins study also used the "excess mortality"
methodology, which measures not only deaths from war, but violent crime and
disease. It found that 91.8% of the excess mortality was due to violence, 31%
of that inflicted by coalition forces.
President Bush immediately dismissed the study's methodology as "pretty well
discredited," and the media either ignored it or accepted the White House's
characterization.
In fact, there is virtual unanimity among biostaticians and mortality experts
that the methodology used in the Johns Hopkins study is accurate. Following up
on an earlier version of the study, Liala Guterman, a senior reporter for the
Chronicle of Higher Education, says she contacted 10 experts in the field about
the Lancet article, and "not one of them took issue with the study's methods or
conclusions." Indeed, she said, the experts found the conclusions "cautious."
According to John Zogby of Zogby International, one of the world's most
respected polling services, "The sampling [in the Lancet survey] is solid, the
methodology is as good as it gets." Ronald Waldman, a Columbia University
epidemiologist, said the method was "tried and true," and British Defense
Ministry science advisor, Sir Roy Anderson, said the survey was "close to the
best practice."
Indeed, the Bush administration used exactly the same methodology to
determine the number of deaths in Darfur, figures that were used to convince
the U.S. Congress to label the current crisis in the Sudan "genocide."
U.S. Casualties
The administration's sleight of hand on deaths and casualties even extends to
its own forces. There are, for instance, no hard figures on the number of
private U.S. and British contractors wounded or killed, even though private
contractors outnumber the number of coalition troops in Iraq.
And when casualty statistics come out in ways the DOD doesn't like, it just
changes how they are counted.
On January 29, 2007, the Pentagon listed 47,657 "non-mortal" casualties in
Iraq. One day later this number had fallen to 31,493 by the simple device of
dropping any casualty that did not require "medical air transport." The DOD
also doesn't include vehicle accidents, or soldiers who are taken ill,
including those with mental problems.
Other Consequences
No one has systematically collected information on the number of Iraqis
wounded by the war, although a ratio of two or three to one wounded to killedin
excess of one million people -- is considered a good rule-of-thumb figure.
Besides the deaths and injuries, the war had unleashed, according to the
Financial Times, "The worst refugee crisis in the Middle East since the mass
exodus of Palestinians that was part of the violent birth of the state of
Israel in 1948." According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 2.2
million Iraqis have fled their country, mostly to Jordan and Syria, and another
2 million have been turned into internal refugees. If one adds to that the ORB
figures for deaths, it means at least 20% of Iraqi's pre-war population of 26
million has been killed, wounded, exiled, or displaced.
The White House has simply ignored the refugee crisis.
In 2006, the United States budgeted $3 million for refugees, although
according to Amman-based researcher Noah Merrill, none of the relief
organizations, including the UN, has seen any of that money. And if they had,
Merrill points out, it would come to a grand total of $3.50 per person. "Jordan
is an expensive country, " he says, "and $3.50 will not help anyone -- not even
for a day."
Half of Iraq's population are children, nearly 20% of them under the age of
five. Some 25% are malnourished and 10% suffer from acute malnutrition.
According to a UNICEF study, 70% of Iraqi's children suffer from traumatic
stress syndrome.
Food rationing, a system on which five million Iraqis rely to stay alive, is
breaking down, and according to Patrick Cockburn of The Independent, two
million can no longer be fed because of security concerns. Unemployment is at
68%. Once the most industrial country in the Arab world, Iraq is devolving into
an oil-rich, agrarian backwater. Some 75% of the country's doctors and
pharmacists have fled, bringing its medical system -- at one time the best in
the Arab world -- to the point of collapse.
And finally, like a biblical plague, cholera is working itself down the
country's river system, from the Kurdish north to Basra in the south. Over
7,000 cases have been confirmed in northern Iraq, according to the World Health
Organization.
In 1258 the Mongol generals Hulagu and Guo Kan besieged and took the city of
Baghdad. They murdered its inhabitants, burned its libraries, and ravished its
lands. The Bush administration has done the same, but hidden it behind a smoke
screen of lies and voodoo statistics.
For the average Iraqi, there is little difference between the Mongols and the
United States. Both have laid waste to their country.
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