Amount of civilians killed in Iraq

[LibertiORDeth]

I have heard estimates as high (or higher then) 1 million people have been killed in Iraq. How do you arrive at these figures? If I tell someone who is pro-war, they will most likely ask for back up to this.

 

[penguinomint]

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

 

[nbhadja]

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

That is only documented deaths. The total number is way higher.

 

[Lucid American]

It's all debatable, imo.

Yes, more people have died than measured on IBC, from secondary causes relating to the war, but I think the assertion that a million civilians have died because of our invasion is baseless.

Throw that number out there, though, and most will acknowledge that most deaths have been caused by the insurgents. The typical neocon, however, will immediately claim you are in denial about how many were dying under Saddam's rule -- basically the "you can't say they were better off under Saddam" argument.

My rebuttal to this is typically just to highlight that any situation that forces us to use a brutal dictator as the measuring stick for right & wrong is probably more wrong than right.

 

[klamath]

The 1 million figure is pretty far fetched to back up but one hell of a lot of people have died there. The US military did not kill that many civilians but the resulting civil war killed a lot of people. Some of those figures on how many people have been killed by the military is based on ammo usage. I can tell you for a fact I expended thousand of rounds but it was all for test firing purposes and I am happy to say I never killed an Iraqi.

 

[klamath]

It's all debatable, imo.

Yes, more people have died than measured on IBC, from secondary causes relating to the war, but I think the assertion that a million civilians have died because of our invasion is baseless.

Throw that number out there, though, and most will acknowledge that most deaths have been caused by the insurgents. The typical neocon, however, will immediately claim you are in denial about how many were dying under Saddam's rule -- basically the "you can't say they were better off under Saddam" argument.

My rebuttal to this is typically just to highlight that any situation that forces us to use a brutal dictator as the measuring stick for right & wrong is probably more wrong than right.

When the number of dead started getting as close to the number that were killed under Saddamn I knew it was wrong.

 

[colecrowe]

I stick with 150,000.

But the worse number is the amount of people displaced, externally and internally (2.5 million out-of-country refugees and 1.5 million in-country refugees)--4 million people out of their homes due to our invasion.

Plus the ethnic cleansing, the roadblocks on every street corner (practically), and the walls around every neighborhood and market square.

Sunnis used to be like 20% of the population and now they're 15% (DON'T quote me on that--I'm going to research it NOW; I'll edit this with the real numbers in a minute).

But the cleasnsing, the displacement, and the walls, combined, with the al-Sadr ceasefire (which might be ending on Saturday (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080220/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq), is really what helped the surge drop violence rates.

And NEVER call the surge a "success". Success would be LOWERING our troop levels, and then having a drop or no rise in violence. Raising troops and lowering violence is EXPECTED, it is a tactic, not a good result, not a proof of success. If that is the definition of success, then adding a million more troops would prove a complete success, I guess. Plus the GAO said that only 3 of the 18 benchmarks have been met.

AARRGH! I remember seeing a blurb about this cease fire when it happened, and I searched for it a few times since to see how it corresponded to the decrease in violence that lead to claims that the surge was working.

Pretty interesting how the timelines add up.

I made the following graphic (well, I labeled the graph from http://icasualties.org) on Jan 29th--so it doesn't include these deaths:

01/31/08Straughter, Matthew F.DoD ConfirmationHostile - hostile fire - RPG attackBaghdad
01/31/08Schultz, David E.DoD ConfirmationHostile - hostile fire - indirect fireScania
01/31/08Norman, Michael A.DoD ConfirmationHostile - hostile fire - IED attackBaghdad
01/28/08Craig, James E.DoD ConfirmationHostile - hostile fire - IED attackMosul
01/28/08Jeffries, Gary W.DoD ConfirmationHostile - hostile fire - IED attackMosul
01/28/08Marshall, Evan A.DoD ConfirmationHostile - hostile fire - IED attackMosul
01/28/08Meyer, Brandon A.DoD ConfirmationHostile - hostile fire - IED attackMosul
01/28/08Young, Joshua A. R.DoD ConfirmationHostile - hostile fire - IED attackMosul

which made the Jan08 line go above the Dec07 line.

Link to graph (there is a zoom button to the top-right of the image here): http://picasaweb.google.com/croweswedding/Iraq/photo#5169118197652832050

 

[colecrowe]

bump