The Grim Numbers
At the corner of 18th and K Streets in Washington, DC, a banner keeps a running tally of U.S. casualties in Iraq. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union updates the banner daily so that “corporate lobbyists and the foreign policy think tanks that dominate the canyons of K St. NW as well as the leaders around the corner at the White House and up the hill in Congress will always remember the impact of the policies that they advocate and the decisions that they make.”
For many Americans, these numbers — 3,834 U.S. soldiers dead, 27,753 wounded — quantify the tragedy of Iraq. It’s all about us: our invasion, our occupation, our losses.
Yet, American public opinion has turned decisively against the war. U.S. casualty figures are part of this story. But the deeper reason is that the U.S. public senses that these sacrifices are for nothing. U.S. military presence has not made Iraq a safer place. And that’s where the other numbers come into play:
• Two million Iraqi refugees and two million internally displaced
• Unemployment rate of 68%
• Over 600,000 Iraqi casualties
This last number is the perhaps the most controversial. President Bush says that the war has cost only 30,000 Iraqi lives. Iraq Body Count, which scrupulously monitors the public sources, puts the casualty rate at around 80,000. A July 2006 study from Johns Hopkins, which measured “excess mortality” by doing an extensive household survey, estimates somewhere in the 600,000 range. And the Just Foreign Policy team has updated this number to establish the ceiling estimate of over one million casualties.
It is very difficult in the fog of war to come up with an accurate number. Suffice it to say that the president is low-balling it, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died. At this point, Americans have been disabused of the notion that the occupation has been a success. They recognize that we have sunk a dagger deep into Iraq. The question is: how can we remove the dagger without killing the victim? As long as first aid is available — in the form of Iraqi security forces, UN peacekeeping, and economic reconstruction assistance — the dagger should be pulled out immediately. [more]