Mourning 2,000 Americans & Who Knows How Many Iraqis

As we take a moment to mourn the Americans who gave their lives in Iraq, I’d like to think about the Iraqis who’ve lost their lives.

I’ve talked before about the Iraqi death tolls; for the most part, until recently no one seemed to be keeping count. I’ve seen a wide range of statistics on the subject of how many Iraqis have died since the start of the war or since the end of the war even.

Finally American Main Stream Media is talking about it; an article on Yahoo!News yesterday claims most experts estimate the number of dead Iraqis to be about 30,000, though others think the number could be higher “since the chaos in Iraq leaves the potential for many killings to go unreported.” Civilians make up 2/3rds of the body count. Iraq Body Count, a British anti-war group, estimates that approximately 1,000 Iraqis have been killed each month (for the 30 months since the start of the war).

Brookings Institution’s military analyst Michael O’Hanlon believes an average of 1,500 to 2,000 Iraqis have been killed per month, including insurgents, while American troops are killed at the rate of about 60 to 70 per month. O’Hanlon also estimates that the Iraqi military suffers 60 to 70 deaths in a week. (This last estimate was skewed by last month’s increase in insurgent attacks.

Exacerbating the carnage is the Iraqi crime rate, now the highest in the Middle East, with about 10,000 homicides a year that would not have happened without the invasion, he said. [“Iraqi Death Toll Much Higher Than U.S.”]

But wait…there’s more…you know how everyone likes to compare the War in Iraq to the Vietnam War? There’s “good news”.

As high as it is, the Iraqi death rate so far is much lower than that of the Vietnamese during the 1954-1976 Vietnam War, when about 1.1 million Vietnamese fighters and some 2 million civilians were killed — a rough average of 12,000 per month.[“Iraqi Death Toll Much Higher Than U.S.”]

And then there’s that argument that keeps coming up about whether or not people would have been better off under Sadam (note: I am not questioning whether or not he was a bad man; he was.)

Dobbins supplied figures from the Baghdad morgue that show 1,800 violent deaths in 2002,
Saddam Hussein’s last full year in power. That number jumped beyond 6,000 in 2003, the first year of the American occupation, and topped 8,000 last year, he said.

“Under Saddam, you usually were OK as long as you kept your mouth shut,” said Joost Hiltermann, an Iraq analyst with the International Crisis Group. “Now you might get hurt or even killed almost arbitrarily, given the absence of rule of law, the sectarian fighting, insurgent actions and U.S. carelessness in responding to attacks.”

Another Center for Strategic and International Studies expert, Jon Alterman, who heads the think tank’s Middle East program, said: “Almost certainly, there were more deaths in the last 2 1/2 years than there would have been had Saddam stayed in power.” [“Iraqi Death Toll Much Higher Than U.S.”]

I guess I just don’t feel comfortable with anyone dying, American or Iraqi. This all just makes me sad, especially now that the official tally for dead Americans fighting in Iraq is 2,000.

tags: American soldiers, Iraq

One comment

1. on November 28, 2005 at 5:09 pm

   nathan johnson said:

   i love it when people try to use the numbers argumenst to justify saddam not being that bad…………saddam wasnt at war……he was already in complete control and he still kille 1800 in a year………uday and hussay(spelling) were supposed to be even worse than saddam……you can also say if the allies had sued for peace with the axis fewer people might have dies in the following 4 years……..but in the long term the japanese would have continued to kill in southeast asia……..germany would continue to exterminate jews and the italians would continue to….well they didnt do much anyways……..iraq is not going to be in state of war forever………just like we had are growing pains…war of 1812 and our own civil war…….so they have theirs

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