A Million Iraqis Killed: This Has to Stop

[Patrick]

This week and next, our senators will vote on amendments that, if approved, could wind down the occupation of Iraq. As a country, we need to enter this debate aware of the very serious consequences this war has had.

In a scientific study published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, researchers from Johns Hopkins estimated that 650,000 Iraqis had died because of our government's invasion of their country.¹ That was last July - a full year ago.

Since then, air raids, heavily armed patrols, car bombs and sectarian killings have continued to take a dreadful toll. Roughly updating the Lancet study, we estimate that nearly one million Iraqis have now been killed.²

For most Americans, this sounds shockingly high. The U.S. media cites much lower numbers, based either on reports from their correspondents (who, far from covering the whole country, are confined to narrow areas of safe passage) or on the politically motivated pronouncements of U.S. and Iraqi officials.

Yet the Johns Hopkins researchers used the methods accepted all over the world to estimate deaths in the wake of war and natural disasters. The United Nations uses them to plan famine relief. Even the Bush administration relies on them, for example, when it accuses Sudan of genocide in Darfur.

In the face of a media blackout, we created a Web counter tracking the Iraqi death toll to spread the word. Many bloggers have already posted it. You can see the counter and get more information and instructions on how to post it at our web site:

http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/iraqdeaths.html

If you do not have a web site, can you tell some friends?

Realization of the daunting scale of the death inflicted on Iraqis adds urgency to our efforts to end the occupation and to prevent future invasions. We need to rein in our government and create a foreign policy based on cooperation, law, and diplomacy rather than violence and aggression.

References 1. "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional
cluster sample survey," Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts, The Lancet, October 11, 2006.
http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s014067360...

2. Click here for a complete explanation of how we updated the Lancet estimate. We derive a rate of increase in Iraqi deaths from the valuable public database of Iraqi deaths reported in the English-language press maintained by Iraq Body Count.

Also Recommended: NPR's This American Life has an eye-opening report on deaths among Iraqis and why we should believe the results of the Lancet study:

http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=320

Les Roberts spells out why we know most estimates of Iraqi deaths are far too low: Les Roberts, "Iraq's death toll is far worse than our leaders admit," The Independent, February 14, 2007.
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2268067.ece

Michael Schwartz also helps us understand how nearly 1,000 Iraqis could be killed every day without being reported in the press: Michael Schwartz, "Media Silence about the Carnage in Iraq," Counterpunch, July 5, 2007.
http://www.counterpunch.org/schwartz07052007.html