Let me be as blunt and direct with the American people as I can be. The invasion of Iraq was a profound diversion from the battle against our greatest enemy–Al Qaeda–which killed more than 3,000 people on 9/11 and which still plots our destruction today. And there’s just no question about it: the president’s misjudgment, miscalculation and mismanagement of the war in Iraq all make the war on terror harder to win.
One of the most-ignored tragedies in our is what the US has done to the people of Iraq. Whether you support the war in Iraq or not, it is difficult to imagine a circumstance in which the deaths of 100,000 (mostly innocent) Iraqis could be described as “acceptable”.
What is likely to cause considerable rancor in this new estimate is that most of the deaths reported were from U.S. bombing — nearly 80 percent — and not as a result of the insurgency. This scale of destruction is on par with the war in Vietnam.
The estimate, to be published next week in The Lancet, a leading British medical journal, comes from a distinguished group of social and medical scientists at Johns Hopkins University, headed by Dr. Les Roberts of the Bloomberg School of Public Health. The team also included researchers at Columbia University and the College of Medicine at Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. They went house-to-house in 33 neighborhoods that reflect Iraq society as a whole and interviewed residents about deaths in their households since the U.S. invaded. The death rate, they found, averaged about 300 percent higher than normal, attributable to the war’s violence.
As reported in Friday’s newspapers, the estimate is being treated with considerable skepticism. The motives of the editors of The Lancet were questioned in The New York Times story (tucked away in a single column on page A8), because the study was released in a special Web version before The Lancet’s usual publication date. It is as if the Times were implying that such major news should have been held until after the election. Over at the Washington Post, a researcher for Human Rights Watch criticized the study’s method by alleging that the sample was too small. HRW and some other groups have tried to count casualties by using documents, such as press reports. Those estimates have been around 17,000 Iraqi deaths.
But the estimate by the Hopkins team is sound in terms of how the data has been gathered and what it says about the casualty rate. A sample of 988 households with more than 7,800 people, in a country of 25 million, is a sizable sample. By comparison, pollsters in this country, using similar techniques of sampling (so the people interviewed in aggregate represent the demographics of the country as a whole), consider a sample of 1,500 people in a country of 280 million to be adequate for extrapolation and reliable results. Wherever possible, too, the researchers verified claims of fatalities with documents. A larger sample would be worthwhile, and as in any important empirical research, it would be useful to repeat the data collection to compare results. But the method is sound.
This should be taken as a clear indictment, not of our troops on the ground, but of our Prevaricator-in-Chief and his dishonest manipulation of faulty intelligence. This allowed both he and his neo-Conservative cohorts to get a war they had wanted since Day One.
If this estimate is correct, and it does appear that the data-collection method IS sound, we- and George W. Bush- are responsible for the deaths of some 800,000 innocent Iraqi civilians. In different times, this would be referred to as a “war crime”. Now, it is merely “collateral damage”. As a nation, we would be up in arms if a Democrat were in the White House and responsible for this sort of carnage. Why does George W. Bush get a free pass? No matter how much and how often Dick Cheney attempts to spin the truth, the war in Iraq has nothing in common with Bush’s never-ending War On Terror. Any yet, fully half of Americans plan on voting for the Butcher of Baghdad. What does that say about us as a people? That it’s OK- as long as someone else’s children are dying? Are we that self-absorbed and ignorant of reality??
Apparently so.
WE DESERVE BETTER.
