Iraqi Casualties and How Little We Hear About Them

Economist.com The Iraqi war

This is only the 2nd article I've seen published during the war on the loss of life in Iraq. In my opinion, Iraqi casualty figures is some pretty powerful data for or against the war. I started poking around once I heard on NPR that there were sites out there taking journalistic numbers ("10 dead today in a car bomb" type data) and converting them into casualty data. I said to myself "yea, I bet that's accurate." One site had a conservative estimate at the time of 4,000 civilian lives lost, where another one counted as high as 10,000. This new report says somewhere around 15,000, and is argued to be conservative because the total amount of deaths is rarely recorded (some die on the way to or at the hospital, some are missed by reporting agency, etc.).

These sites exist because the Pentagon's position on foreign casualties is that it's not their responsibility to keep those numbers. It is up to the leaders of that foreign body to account for their dead. In an invasion setting, it would make sense not to keep count, mainly due to the fact that you simply can't identify with 100% certainty that the person you just shot/bombed was carrying a gun and had the intent to kill you, therefore you don't know if they were a civilian or not. You also can't tell which people insurgents were using as human shields.

But as the invasion transformed into an occupation/rebuilding effort, a system should( or should have) been developed. How many more enemies are we making in our efforts to free Iraq. The whole model for success is that once people get a taste of freedom, they will forgive that U.S. bombs killed their parents when they were children (or vice versa). The U.S. is not the only society that holds retribution and vengeance in such high esteem.

Making enemies? Sure! When the U.S. first set out on this mission, they said we were going to 1) Oust Saddam, 2) Destroy his stockpiles of WMDs, 3) free the iraqi people. (Listed in order of priority of course). So a country came into mine, concerned about their own freedom (threat of WMDs), arrested my maniacal dictator, brought their ongoing war to my homeland, and killed many of my good countrymen, and were completely wrong about the threat to their country. But they DID give me freedom and secured it by killing all the evil people who would poison my freedom.

The U.S. is going to be there for a looooong time, because if Iraq were to fall back into corruption....you'd have an entire nation wanting revenge.