Saddam killed thousands of Iraqi civilians, and the US is on pace to top him

after only eighteen months versus twenty years. This seems to nullify the Iraq is better off without Saddam argument.

http://www.abc.net.au/cgi-bin/commo...c.net.au/worldtoday/content/2004/s1230764.htm

The World Today - The price of war: 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead

[This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2004/s1230764.htm]


The World Today - Friday, 29 October , 2004 12:10:00
Reporter: Karen Barlow
ELEANOR HALL: But first to the civilian death toll in Iraq.

18 months ago US President George W. Bush flew onto the deck of an aircraft carrier to claim that major combat operations in Iraq were over, while a banner fluttered above him declaring: "Mission Accomplished..."

(Sound of jet landing on aircraft carrier)

GEORGE BUSH: In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We are bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous.

We have begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We're helping to rebuild Iraq where the dictator built palaces for himself instead of hospitals and schools.

We thank the armed forces of the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland, who shared in the hardships of war.

ELEANOR HALL: But as we now know, while the major battle may have ended violence in Iraq has continued and even intensified since that time, and today there is confirmation that it's Iraqi civilians who have been bearing the brunt of what President Bush called the hardships of war.

While the Bush administration and its allies, including here in Australia, say Iraq is now on the path to democracy, researchers at the Johns Hopkins University in the United States have been counting the cost.

Their study published in the British Lancet Medical Journal, has found that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war, the majority of them women and children killed in air strikes.

As Karen Barlow reports this research finds the cost in Iraqi lives is much higher than previously estimated.

KAREN BARLOW: There is a famous quote from the former commander of US Central command in Iraq, US general Tommy Franks. That is: "we don't do body counts."

Well the US military may not count civilian deaths, but other people do. Over the past 18 months of the US-led invasion, academics and peace activists have been trying to monitor Iraq, mostly through media reports.

Now the Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore in the United States has conducted the first scientific study of the effects of the war in Iraq, and the results are surprising.

Study Author Dr Gil Burnham says his team compared mortality rates in Iraq before and after the March 2003 invasion.

GIL BURNHAM: And what we found was that mortality rates or death rates had increased substantially, and the thing that accounted for the increase in the death rates was violence.

Much of this violence was – in fact most of it – was related to the coalition forces being present, and the increased deaths were almost exclusively related to – not exclusively – but very heavily related to aerial bombardments of urban populations.

KAREN BARLOW: The report found that the majority of the civilian deaths were women and children, and many were Iraqis were killed around the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah, northwest of Baghdad.

Some of the civilian deaths were not due to violence, but were related to the war, including poor access to health services and clean water.

But Dr Gil Burnham says the Iraq war is particularly violent for civilians, especially when compared to other recent US military campaigns, such as the Balkan conflict.

He denies there is a political reason for releasing the report four days out from the US Presidential election.

GIL BURNHAM: Really, our motives were to get issues related to the ongoing conflict, what we found as a very high death rate among civilians, we wanted to get this into discussion, now, when these kinds of issues came up.

It could be argued that if we had put the… if the publication had been put off until after the election, you could argue there was a motive there.

KAREN BARLOW: Regardless though, do you expect the Democrats will leap on these figures?

GIL BURNHAM: Oh, I expect that people are going to leap on them right, left and centre and everyone's going to accuse us of all kinds of motives and so forth.

KAREN BARLOW: What about the news media in the United States, what are you expecting there?

GIL BURNHAM: Well, we got a lot of interest from it, of course, and I expect that we'll get considerable coverage from that, and then I expect that also there'll be a lot of the usual thing of questioning the data and looking at the method and probing around and so forth.

This was, as you know, published in the Lancet which is really the world's premier medical journal, and that was… I don't think there have been many publications in recent years the Lancet has been peer reviewed and evaluated and discussed as much as this one. So it's been through all the levels of scientific scrutiny that I think things usually get.

KAREN BARLOW: Do you think Americans care about these figures?

GIL BURNHAM: Well, I hope they do (laughs). I mean, we wouldn't go to the effort of doing something like this if we didn't feel that here was a situation that was egregious and, you know, there really needs to be some attention to what we can do to better protect the civilians. And I think basically Americans, like anybody else, are compassionate people.

KAREN BARLOW: Is it pertinent here to remember the words spoken at the start of this military campaign when the leaders of the United States said that they would actually do their best to protect the Iraqi civilians, and they were going in on their behalf to get rid of Saddam Hussein?

GIL BURNHAM: Well, I think every military campaign starts with great expectations that will minimise civilian population damage and so forth, and sometimes we're successful and sometimes we're not.

And I think that everybody agrees that the situation in Iraq is not progressing as people had originally planned, and in the process of redirecting military strategy and so forth, I think our message is very clearly, you know, if you're not careful, civilians are going to take a, unnecessarily heavy brunt of this change in strategy.

So again, you know, it's easy to have a good words at the beginning of things, but when things turn out otherwise, then we need to remember what we pledged to do in the beginning.

 

Direct link to Lancet requires registration and I'm lazy.

We increased the chance of random death by violence approximately 5800 percent.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1338749,00.html



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The study, which was carried out in 33 randomly-chosen neighbourhoods of Iraq representative of the entire population, shows that violence is now the leading cause of death in Iraq. Before the invasion, most people died of heart attacks, stroke and chronic illness. The risk of a violent death is now 58 times higher than it was before the invasion.

Last night the Lancet medical journal fast-tracked the survey to publication on its website after rapid, but extensive peer review and editing because, said Lancet editor Richard Horton, "of its importance to the evolving security situation in Iraq". But the findings raised important questions also for the governments of the United Sates and Britain who, said Dr Horton in a commentary, "must have considered the likely effects of their actions for civilians".

The research was led by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. Five of the six Iraqi interviewers who went to the 988 households in the survey were doctors and all those involved in the research on the ground, says the paper, risked their lives to collect the data. Householders were asked about births and deaths in the 14.6 months before the March 2003 invasion, and births and deaths in the 17.8 months afterwards.


When death certificates were not available, there were good reasons, say the authors. "We think it is unlikely that deaths were falsely recorded. Interviewers also believed that in the Iraqi culture it was unlikely for respondents to fabricate deaths," they write
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From what I've read they simply extrapolated from the 12 month survey period to the 18 month occupation period. The primary author admits a wide range of possible correct numbers but since we don't do body counts...


I think the most interesting thing about the study is the overwhelming majority of civilian deaths are from airstrikes. The unwritten tradeoff is going in on the ground and having more American casualties on the ground for fewer civilian casualties.

 

Essentially this says Lancet study is not very precise and Iraq Body Count is much better.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2108887/

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So, let's call it 15,000 or—allowing for deaths that the press didn't report—20,000 or 25,000, maybe 30,000 Iraqi civilians killed in a pre-emptive war waged (according to the latest rationale) on their behalf. That's a number more solidly rooted in reality than the Hopkins figure—and, given that fact, no less shocking.

 

No one said that except you.

The problem is the Bushies have dehumanized Muslims so it's just an abstract number to most folks.

There are other policies we could use with force that would not kill so many civilians.

The point is killing as many Iraqis as Saddam doesn't engender one towards the local populace. If the victims' families seem ungrateful, that's a natural reaction.

Dehumanizing people makes it easier for people to justify things like Abu Gharib and this to themselves.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/world/2885546

Slaying of injured Iraqi stirs controversy
U.S. soldiers say the shooting was a 'mercy killing'
By EDMUND SANDERS
Los Angeles Times


BAGHDAD, IRAQ - As a U.S. Army patrol rolled into Sadr City one night in August, soldiers received a tip that militants in dump trucks were planting roadside bombs.

American troops had been clashing regularly with Al Mahdi militiamen in the restive Baghdad slum. So when Staff Sgt. Cardenas Alban of Carson, Calif., saw an object fall from a garbage truck in the distance, his company took positions around the vehicle and unleashed a barrage of fire from rifles and a 25-millimeter cannon atop a Bradley fighting vehicle. The truck exploded in flames.

As soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment approached the burning vehicle, they did not find insurgents. The victims were mainly teenagers, hired to work the late shift picking up trash for about $5 a night, witnesses said.

Medics scrambled to treat the half a dozen people strewn around the scene. A dispute broke out among a handful of soldiers standing over one severely wounded young man who was moaning in pain. An unwounded Iraqi claiming to be a relative of the victim pleaded in broken English for soldiers to help him.

But to the horror of bystanders, Alban, 29, a boyish-faced sergeant who joined the Army in 1997, retrieved an M-231 assault rifle and fired into the wounded man's body. Seconds later, another soldier, Staff Sgt. Johnny Horne Jr., 30, of Winston-Salem, N.C., grabbed an M-16 rifle and also shot the victim.

The killing might have been forgotten except for a U.S. soldier who days later slipped an anonymous note under the door of the unit's commander, Capt. Robert Humphries, warning that "soldiers had committed serious crimes that needed to be looked at."
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