Death in Iraq

October 17, 2006

Let's set aside how many civilians have been killed in Iraq since the war started. The numbers too readily become the focal point for political debate and allow only for muddled thinking about the problem. It also distracts from the main issue, the causes of death in Iraq and how they have changed. Those realities cannot be as easily disputed as a number or math equation on a website or in a science journal.

In pre-war Iraq, the main causes of death for the average Iraqi were heart attack, stroke and chronic illness. Similar to the United States. This is because Saddam Hussein had things "under control". There were no terrorists because when captured, they were tortured and killed much like the U.S. does today in secret foreign prisons. (You don’t think we have closed all of them, do you?)

During the Saddam era, his people were definitely under a brutal dictatorship unable to speak freely and in fear of reprisal if he was offended but the main causes of death weren’t Saddam’s executions or death squads.

In the Iraq now, the overall risk of death has increased dramatically and this certainly makes sense because most of Iraq is a war zone.  The number one killer today is violence in the form of bombings and air strikes by U.S. and Coalition forces, insurgent IEDs and suicide bombs and death squads filled with Iraqi police which typically use guns and knives to shoot, stab or behead their victims.

The number of excess deaths because of the Iraq war is in the tens of thousands no matter which source you support. Even Bush acknowledges that thousands of Iraqis have died during and after the invasion. He announced this in December 2005 and said that "30,000, more or less” had been killed up to that point. Unfortunately, since that time, the death rate has increased as the Iraq civil war heats up.

The Administration’s response has been to officially ignore the high civilian mortality and deflect blame, by saying there will always be unintended collateral damage in a war. Besides, they say, terrorists and insurgents by operating in residential neighborhoods, use civilians as shields so it is their fault.

Rationalizations will not cover the facts. The U.S. cannot honestly say it had little or no part in the situation and ignoring it won’t make it go away either.

The initial phase of our unilateral invasion had a relatively low death rate but the unplanned occupation and now civil war are devastating the population. For this, the U.S. and specifically the Bush Administration are to blame.

Again, the numbers mean little. Whether the number of civilian deaths is 10,000, 30,000 or 655,000, the truth is that most of these deaths have been in a war started by Bush and his allies.