There’ve been a lot of thoughtful posts about the study on the Iraq death toll:
A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.
The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq’s government.
It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.
The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq’s mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.
This is just a link roundup about the number and the spin on the number, because I don’t really have anything to add:
DJW at Lawyers, Guns, and Money:
Yes, you read that right. Unless they’ve shown that Iraq is the worst place in the world, Murray can’t get himself too worried about it.
These are classic right-wing tactics. Bush is now able to say that his mistake killed 30,000 people, and he gets to sound reaonsable because a study claiming 665,000 sounds so ludicrous to your typical American. So the left argues back that the numbers are defensible, and the right retorts that it’s preposterous — 50,000 at most. That’s practically nothing!
They blow off the lies that got us into the war. They blow off the fact that their beloved BushCo is dissolving our basic civil liberties. They blow off torture in the prisons. Now they blow off 655,000 dead, and indeed seem incapable of understanding that each of these dead was loved by someone, that each one is not just the loss of a human life, but the ruin to other human lives. It’s not that they blow it off, but they blow it off so quickly, so thoughtlessly. 655,000 dead people isn’t 655,000 dead people to the hive of wingnuts, it’s a low blow to Dear Leader, it’s mere pandering to people who still have a moral compass.
It doesn’t come as a surprise that the Bush administration gives the study “mixed reviews”, because this is the administration that doesn’t do body counts. Or at least doesn’t do them for bodies that dont’ count in the first place. Gen. Casey says the report is “way beyond any number that I have seen,” and claims the count he’s seen is closer to 50,000. Kind of odd coming from an administration that, as a matter of policy, doesn’t do body counts.
The response to the study actually brings up an intersting question. What’s the threshold of acceptable Iraqi deaths? The study gives a range of 392,979 and 942,636, and settles on an estimate somewhere in the middle of that. But even the lower number of that range is still several times bigger than Casey’s estimate. And if the claims that Saddam killed a million Iraqis during his 1979-2003 reigh, then the higher end means that the U.S. war and occupation has killed nearly as many Iraqis as Saddam did and in less time.
That there could be an acceptable number of Iraqi deaths, justifiable or excusabl even, is only slightly more frustrating than the news, coming on the heels of the latest butcher’s bill from Iraq, that a significan number of Americans are changing their minds about the war in Iraq. According to Newsweek, nearly 60% of Americas now believe that Bush misled Americans in making the case for invading Iraq.
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