- A just released study by researchers at Johns Hopkins
University, published in the current issue of the prestigious British medical
journal The Lancet, reports that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq
has led to the deaths of between 426,000 and 794,000 Iraqis. This is a
substantial increase over the 100,000 dead that the same research group
found through 2004, based upon a smaller survey, and it represents an astonishing
2.5 percent of the country's total population.
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- The grim news was widely--though not universally--reported
in the U.S. media (my local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, blacked it
out), but few news organizations reported the most disturbing finding of
the study, which was that 31 percent of those killed were actually slain
by U.S. and "coalition" forces (actually by U.S. forces, since
most of the other foreign forces working with the U.S., with the exception
of the British, have not played combat roles, and even the British have
largely operated in the south where fighting has been much less severe).
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- That means U.S. forces have, since the March 19, 2003
invasion, killed between 132,000 and 246,000 Iraqis. It should be recalled
that the Pentagon has estimated that the insurgency numbers perhaps 20-40,000
individuals, and they have only succeeded in killing a fraction of them.
Assuming generously that the military has succeeded in killing maybe a
quarter of the enemy fighters, that would be 10,000 people at most, leaving
the U.S. civilian death toll at 122,000-236,000. The Christian Science
Monitor, no radical rag, once did a survey and found that U.S. forces were
killing civilians in Iraq at a rate of 30 for every enemy fighter slain.
At that rate, it would appear, if the peer-reviewed Lancet study is correct,
that the U.S. invasion and occupation forces have killed between 127,000
and 238,000 civilians. At least a third and perhaps a half of those killed,
various studies of Iraqi casualties have made clear, have been children.
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- This is the grand war of liberation and democracy that
our bloodstained president hails as his legacy!
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- This is the war that we are told is making America safer.
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- Just to put things in a little perspective, the Iraqis
killed at the hands of our "heroes" in uniform on orders of this
great commander in chief represent about one percent of the Iraqi population
of 24 million. If a comparable number of Americans were being killed in
a war, it would be as if we had lost between 1 million and 1.9 million
people! Imagine Americans referring to any army that did such a thing as
a "liberator"! Anyone who thinks that we are making friends this
way in Iraq has to be an idiot.
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- It boggles my mind how the U.S. share of this slaughter
could have been kept out of the report offered in the New York Times or
USA Today. (The Times did run some small pie charts that showed in a dark
shade the share of deaths caused by U.S. forces, but because no numbers
or percentages were provided, and because no such figures appeared in the
accompanying story, the impact was greatly diminished.)
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- What made the Times article, which ran on an inside page,
particularly offensive, was a page-one story that ran on the same day,
headlined "3rd Iraq Death Has One town Shaken to Core." This
piece looked in detail about how the deaths in Iraq of three servicemen
from the New York hamlet of Highland, had caused such widespread grief
and anguish in a small American town. How on earth could editors give that
story--excellent and poignant as it was in its own right--such prominence
while burying a report about the wholesale slaughter of a people by U.S.
forces? Don't the editors realize that every one of those Iraqi deaths
was producing the same kind of grief and anger in towns and villages across
Iraq?
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- Americans still haven't grasped the horror that American
troops are inflicting upon the Iraqi people, and hiding these numbers--and
the American military's direct responsibility for nearly a third of them--is
an example of why.
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- The Bush administration has carefully seen to it that
Americans will not see the evidence of American deaths and injuries. Coffins
are flown in to Dover Airbase, a closed military compound in Delaware,
at night. The administration has also blacked out Iraqi deaths by refusing
to provide body counts from U.S. military actions, and by preventing reporters
from operating in Iraq unescorted.
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- The Lancet study has burst that veil of secrecy, at least
partially, though it appears that the U.S. media continue to cooperate
for the most part in keeping the ugliest truth--the Iraqi civilian casualty
rate--out of their reports. If you want that kind of information, you have
to go to the Lancet report itself or to the British newspapers, like The
Guardian, which have it stated clearly.
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- Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation
into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch
columns, titled This Can't be Happening!, is published by Common Courage
Press. Lindorff's latest book is The Case for Impeachment, co-authored
by Barbara Olshansky. Visit his website for more information. Lindorff
may be reached at dlindorff@yahoo.com. This story is published in the Baltimore
Chronicle with permission of the author.
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