I frequently receive emails from right-winger supporters of the Bushiban (thanks, Indiana FOR!) asking why I decry the deaths of 100,000 Iraqis at the hands of US forces while ignoring the mass murders allegedly committed by Saddam Hussein during his tenure as dictator of that beleagured country.
First the Lancet study about the 100,000 deaths, from the International Herald Tribune on Oct. 16:
More than 100,000 civilians have probably died as direct or indirect consequences of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, according to a study by a research team at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. The report was published on the Internet by The Lancet, the British medical journal. The figure is far higher than previous mortality estimates. Editors of the journal decided not to wait for The Lancet’s normal publication date next week, but instead to place the research online Friday, apparently so it could circulate before the U.S. presidential election.
The finding is certain to generate intense controversy, since the Bush administration has not estimated civilian casualties from the conflict, and independent groups have put the number at most in the tens of thousands.
In the study, teams of researchers fanned out across Iraq in mid-September to interview nearly 1,000 families in 33 previously selected locations. Families were interviewed about births and deaths in the household before and after the invasion. Although the paper’s authors acknowledge that thorough data collection was difficult in what is effectively still a war zone, the data they managed to collect are extensive: Iraqis were 2.5 times more likely to die in the 17 months following the invasion than in the 14 months before it. Before the invasion, the most common causes of death in Iraq were heart attacks, strokes and chronic diseases. Afterward, violent death was far ahead of all other causes. “We were shocked at the magnitude but we’re quite sure that the estimate of 100,000 is a conservative estimate,” said Dr. Gilbert Burnham of the Johns Hopkins study team. He said the team had excluded deaths in Falluja in making their estimate, since that city was the site of unusually intense violence.
In 15 of the 33 communities visited, residents reported violent deaths in the family since the conflict started in March 2003. They attributed many of those deaths to attacks by coalition forces – mostly airstrikes – and most of the reported deaths were of women and children.
The risk of violent death was 58 times higher than before the war, the researchers found.
“The fact that more than half of the deaths caused by the occupation forces were women and children is a cause for concern,” the authors wrote.
Human Rights Watch estimates that Saddam murdered 290,000 Iraqis, plus 100,000 Kurds during the 1988 war with Iran. That makes a total of roughly 400,000 dead. As far as I know, no conservative supporter of the war has accused Saddam of higher numbers than that.
Now the comparison.
For the sake of kindness to Bush, we’ll leave out the Iraqi soldiers we killed during the invasion, as well as members of the Iraqi resistance. We’ll even leave out those who died in US custody. We’ll just count the Lancet’s 100,000 civilians.
Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq for 35 years. He killed 400,000 people during that time. That equals a little over 10,000 Iraqis per year. George W. Bush, in just a year, killed 100,000 people.
George W. Bush kills Iraqis at ten times the rate of Saddam Hussein.
Only an idiot would call this liberation.
