It gives me no pleasure to comment on the estimated death toll of the conflict in Iraq yet I came across a website today, justforeignpolicy.org, that claimed that (at the time of writing) 1,219,596 Iraqis had been killed since March 2003 and I felt compelled to write a short note about the matter. Clearly this is a difficult and emotive subject and let me make it clear the death of any innocent human being is an unquantifiable tragedy.
It will be a source of eternal shame for the US that its Government deliberately avoided cataloguing the deaths of civilians that occurred after the invasion of 2003. I am not sure that the numbers of violent deaths in Iraq prove or disprove the moral legitimacy of that war or any war. Some sixty million people died in World War Two, but that does not mean the war should not have been fought. Iraq has seen enough tragedy in the last thirty years to last an eternity and I do not mean to diminish the undoubted suffering of the Iraqi people.
Yet when it is claimed without shame that one and a quarter million people have died since 2003 it is perhaps morally right to question these figures.
If we accept that 1,219,596 Iraqis have been killed since 2003, then that means that around 243,919 people have been killed in Iraq each year since the invasion. That would involve the violent deaths of 668 people every single day for five years straight. Iraq has had some bloody periods over the last five years but there has not been a single day in the last 5 years that anything close to that number of violent deaths has been recorded. Iraq Body Count has conducted an exhaustive survey of deaths in Iraq, including the number of bodies dumped on the streets and delivered to morgues. Even between March 2006 and March 2007, by far and away the bloodiest period, an average of 73 civilians were killed every day, that’s 595 fewer than Just Foreign Policy’s estimates. Now Iraq Body Count must be taken as a low estimate, some civilians undoubtedly died of their injuries unreported and forgotten, and some violent incidents will undoubtedly have been missed by the researchers. Yet Iraq Body Count is pretty scrupulous and it is inconceivable that it has missed the equivalent of the violent deaths 600 people every single day for more than five years. Iraq Body Count estimates that between 84,000 and 91,000 Iraqis have been killed since 2003 and this to me seems a more likely figure. Undoubtedly the real figure is slightly higher, casualties will have succumbed to their wounds and some incidents will have slipped through the net. However it seems impossible to me that the true figure could be anything more than double this amount. According to Just Foreign Policy however, Iraq Body Count has underestimated by a factor of around twenty.
During World War Two every single city in Japan was flattened by the US Air Force, atomic bombs were dropped on two cities and a densely populated island was bitterly fought over. The Japanese civilian death toll for the entire war was 580,000 less than half the figure quoted for the war in Iraq. Similarly every single city in Nazi Germany, (a country with a population three times that of Iraq) was decimated by allied bombers, the country was torn apart by four enormous armies during a six year long ‘total war’, yet the civilian casualty figures for Nazi Germany are similar to those quoted for Iraq. In Britain 67,800 civilians were killed during the blitz and the V bomb raids. The total military casualty figures for Britain, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand during the entire war put together are far lower than those quoted for Iraq by Just Foreign Policy.
As I say I have no wish to diminish or belittle the immense suffering of the Iraqi people and I do not wish to use the number of dead to make a political point about the rights or the wrongs of the conflict. For those that do wish to use the number of deaths in Iraq to emphasise the evilness of Bush and his allies, I only ask that they subject their claims to rational analysis. It seems that too many jump upon the most ghoulish predictions in order to make their arguments seems all the more watertight. One should be careful what one wishes for.
You argue your position well and seriously. On 10 January the deaths claimed by those whose approach you criticise stood at 1,164,650. You may be interested in a thread on my blog which discussed the issue at that time. See
http://threescoreyearsandten.blogspot.com/2008/01/violent-deaths-in-iraq-since-invasion.html
I agree with a lot of your analysis in the item above this one on Afghanistan. I opposed the invasion of Iraq and one of its consequences was that it has overstretch our and other forces in being able to handle the situation in Afganistan. However once coalition forces mistakenly (for me) invaded Iraq, they could not just then put the clock back by withdrawing - although matters were then often handled in counter-productive fashion.