[Vision2020] How Many Iraqis Dead?

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Hail to the Vision!

This morning I spent one of most stressful hours of my recent life taking phone pledges for Northwest Public Radio.  The computers were down, so we had to write down the information by hand, and I took one call after the other with only one break when we ran out of pledge forms.

I did this and will do it again because I believe that NPR has the best radio programming in the world.  It is one of the things I miss most when I travel abroad, but now with better internet connections I can now listen to it on web more often.

When I returned home, Diane Riem had three guests talking about Iraqi mortality since the start of the war.  One was a Johns Hopkins Professor Les Roberts, one of the authors of the Lancet journal article claiming 655,000 deaths; the second was Anthony Cordesman, one of the most respected voices on international affairs, especially Iraq; and then Hassan Mneimneh speaking on behalf of Iraq's Memory Foundation.  You can listen for yourself at http://www.wamu.org/programs/dr.

The Iraqi, trained as an engineer, admitted that he could find no fault with Roberts' methodology, but his main objection to the high figure was that there should be many more bodies and much more mourning if 500 Iraqis had died each day since March, 2003.  

Mneimneh did confirm Roberts' claim that the Baghdad morgue had received 30,000 bodies since March, 2003, and that the capital usually accounts for 20 percent of deaths reported.  That means that at least 150,000 Iraqis have died, three times the figure that Gen. Casey reported and five times the figure that Bush defended yesterday.  Cordesman stated that the Bush administration has admitted that Sunni-Shiite deaths have increased 12 times since the beginning of the year.

Cordesman followed a similar line as Mneimneh, emphasizing that there would also be many more wounded, and no Iraqi or Coalition hospital has reported causalities this high.  Cordesman said, and I'm quoting directly from my speakers, that "we've not seen these results on the ground." Cordesman also thought that the timing of the release of this article was politically motivated, a charge that Roberts did not address, perhaps because he thought that it did not dignify a response.

Prof. Roberts defended his count, admitting, however, that it could be as low as 400,000. He reminded us that his methodology has been used and recognized by the U. S. government to calculate deaths in Bosnia and other crisis areas.  He noted that 15 percent of the population of the Congo had been killed over a 3 year period, a number recognized by many authorities, but morgues and hospitals reported far fewer dead and wounded.  Roberts emphasized that their study was the first to use Iraqi doctors going door to door collecting data.  He also emphasized that in 92 percent of the households, they were able to get death certificates.

Therefore, I'm going to raise my own count from 50,000 to 150,000, half the 300,000 deaths attributed to Saddam.  The difference of course is that Saddam ruled for 285 months and the war has lasted just 42 months.  This means that nearly 3600 Iraqis have died each month since the U. S. invasion as opposed 1053 per month under Saddam.

Nick Gier, Supporting the Troops but Rejecting this Disastrous War