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About That Agressive War in Iraq
Last edited Wed Mar 19, 2014, 03:21 PM - Edit history (1)
links within:
http://web.mit.edu/humancostiraq/
Welcome
Conventional wisdom in American politics focuses only on American costs in the war in Iraq: the casualties to U.S. soldiers, the financial costs, and sometimes the strategic costs. But the human cost to the Iraqis themselves are nearly ignored in political discourse, the news media, and intellectual circles. This site is a corrective to those oversights. We present empirical reports, studies, and other accounts that convey and assess the consequences of war for the people of Iraq.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Looking Back on Ten Years of War, Trauma, Death, & Displacement
Major studies of war mortality
Three major studies of war mortality have been done in Iraq. Two appeared in The Lancet, the British medical journal, and one appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. They bear strong similarities in their findings, but have some important differences, too.
The first household survey that appeared was published in The Lancet in October 2004, measuring the war-related mortality in the war's first 18 months. The researchers--mainly epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and medical personnel in Iraq--estimated 98,000 "excess deaths" due to war. Read
The second household survey, conducted by the Hopkins scientists again, was completed in June 2006 and published four months later in The Lancet. Its findings: 650,000 people (civilians and fighters) died as a result of the war in Iraq. Read
Another household survey, this one conducted by the Iraq Ministry of Health at the same time as the second Hopkins study, found 400,000 excess deaths, 151,000 by violence. As is the case with most such surveys conducted during time of war, there were problems in data gathering and the analysis tended to minimize violent death estimates. But the survey generally confirmed the very high mortality reported in The Lancet. Read
It should be noted that both the second Lancet article and the New England Journal of Medicine article were based on studies that were completed at the height of war-related violence in Iraq. Large-scale fighting continued for another year and slowly subsided for a year after that to lower but continuing levels. So their estimates are a fraction of the total caused by the war.
In 2008, the peer-reviewed journal, Conflict and Health, published "Iraq War Mortality Estimates: A Systematic Review," and found that the household survey method was superior to other forms of counting.
Other Estimates
Several other attempts have been made to estimate the war dead, and particularly civilians killed by violence. Iraq Body Count is the most well known. It counted individuals reported in English-language newspapers, mainly, which severely limited its scope. Similarly, the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index and the U.N. office in Iraq used "passive surveillance" methods (reports from morgues as well as newspapers). The problem with these methods is that they only capture part of the total picture (as with mrgue statistics), their "surveillance instrument" (i.e., newspapers) change over time, and so on. (See the discussion of methods in the Conflict and Health article cited above.) They are mainly useful for viewing trends. Wikileaks also released U.S. military data in 2010, but this was also quite partial--reports from U.S. military personnel.
In 2013, a group of scholars at Columbia University's School of Public Health published a comparison of the Wikileaks and Iraq Body Count estimates, and found a small percentage of single reported deaths overlapping--indicating that the total dead was significantly higher than either estimate held.
Displacement: Refugees and internally displaced
The number of displaced persons, both internal (within Iraq) and external (refugees, mainly in Jordan and Syria) ranged from estimates of 3.5 million to 5 million or more, which were directly attributable to the war. Virtually all first-hand accounts blamed violence as the cause of moving, or threats of ethnic or sectarian cleansing of neighborhoods.
The ravages of displacement, which remains at about 3 million, are bad enough. But it is also another indicator of the scale of mortality. All wars since 1945 have ratios of displaced to fatalities of 10:1 or less, typically more in the range of 5:1. If this typical ratio holds for the Iraq War, that indicates mortality of about one million Iraqis.
- Maps of displacement inside Iraq (up to 2011)
- According UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, the total number of internally displaced equals more than 1.3 million, and the number of refugees exceeds 1.4 million. Total "persons of concern" exceed 3 million. UNHCR web site
- Analysis of internally displaced crisis by International Rescue Committee, a major NGO (March 2013)
- An assessment of IDP situation by the Middle East Institute (Oct 2012)
- Iraqi Refugee Stories - first-hand accounts (video)
- Analysis and advocacy on Iraqi refugees from Human Rights First
Health Effects of War
Health-related impacts on children in Iraq, from the Brussels Tribunal and Global Research, Canada, dewscribes the broad effects on children, including birth defects, cancer, denial of rights, etc. (February 2013).
Environmental Contaminants from War Remnants in Iraq, a well-documented 2011 report that focuses mainly on depleted uranium and its carcinogenic qualities
"Effects of the War on Nutrition and Health...in Children," measured effects empirically in the mot violent areas (2009) and found profound impacts on children's health.
Birth defects in Fallujah, Iraq, rise markedly, says a 2011 medical study. Fallujah, the largest city in Anbar province, was the scene of two enormous battles between US forces and "insurgents."
Metal contamination: "Within less than a decade, the occurrence of congenital birth defects increased by an astonishing 17-fold in the same hospital." Medical study, 2012.
PREVIOUS NEWS & COMMENT
End of U.S. troops occasions minor reflection on war & destruction
The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq has spurred little new information on the scale of destruction in the 8 year, 8 month war. Professor Juan Cole had this to say:
The American public still for the most part has no idea what the United States did to that country, and until we Americans take responsibility for the harm we do others with our perpetual wars, we can never recover from our war sickness, which drives us to resort to violence in international affairs in a way no other democracy routinely does.
Population of Iraq: 30 million.
Number of Iraqis killed in attacks in November 2011: 187
Average monthly civilian deaths in Afghanistan War, first half of 2011: 243
Percentage of Iraqis who lived in slum conditions in 2000: 17
Percentage of Iraqis who live in slum conditions in 2011: 50
Number of the 30 million Iraqis living below the poverty line: 7 million.
Number of Iraqis who died of violence 2003-2011: 150,000 to 400,000.
Orphans in Iraq: 4.5 million.
Orphans living in the streets: 600,000.
Number of women, mainly widows, who are primary breadwinners in family: 2 million.
Iraqi refugees displaced by the American war to Syria: 1 million
Internally displaced [pdf] persons in Iraq: 1.3 million
Proportion of displaced persons who have returned home since 2008: 1/8
Rank of Iraq on Corruption Index among 182 countries: 175
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMMENT: From the Canadian International Council website, John Tirman, wrote (Dec. 16, 2011):
War has a powerful impact on those who have lived through one, bending every calculation, every thought, every action to the possible consequences of violence, deprivation, displacement and the other ravages of conflict. Oddly, war has become a distant occurrence for most of us in the industrialized West. The armed forces of Canada and the United States are all-volunteer and have been for many years, so very few who are unwilling to go to war or work in war zones are actually forced to experience its maelstrom.
But the people who live in war zones do, of course. Many millions of them are directly affected by the violence, now for more than a decade in Afghanistan in its latest war and for nearly nine years in Iraq in a war that followed 12 years of crippling sanctions and the short but intense Operation Desert Storm.
And there’s the rub: war devastates these places, but to us they are remote and largely forgettable. The amount of public attention to Afghanistan and Iraq has declined steadily. We scarcely pay attention to what has happened to the native populations. There are, perhaps, political and psychological reasons for this indifference—a turning away from the violence, a mission gone bad, falsehoods proffered by politicians, and many others. But the indifference is unmistakable. The news media rarely describes the ruinous consequences of U.S. policy and war-making for Afghanis and Iraqis. Few, if any, novels, films or other cultural expressions attempt to capture this suffering either.
This broad tendency to forget, or intentionally put aside, the ravages of war was evident during and after the Korean War (1950-53) and the Indochina wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1960s and early ’70s. But we forget at our peril. We should care about what happens to these people and their societies, not only for moral reasons, but also because forgetting has consequences.
Counting the Dead
One symptom of this indifference is the absence of an adequate accounting of the wars’ destruction, particularly of war mortality. The governments don’t discuss it, and the news media reliably report the lowest conceivable numbers—“tens of thousands” is the usual formulation for Iraq – or the partial numbers collated by the U.N. office in Kabul for Afghanistan. In fact, the numbers of fatalities are significantly higher and need to be studied for their implications.
In Iraq, some brave attempts to collect and analyze data about war-related mortality have at least given us a sense of the scale of mayhem. Several household surveys, the state-of-the-art method favored by epidemiologists, indicate a death toll reaching well into the hundreds of thousands. (This includes all Iraqis, not just civilians, from direct violence and indirectly due to other factors – so-called excess deaths above the pre-war mortality rate.) Even the oft-cited tally of Iraq Body Count, a U.K.-based NGO, holds that more than 100,000 civilians have died as a result of violence. IBC’s method is crude and incomplete—it gathers data mainly from English-language newspapers—and they acknowledge an undercount by at least a factor of two. The lowest estimate of all the household surveys—a large, randomized sample conducted by the Ministry of Health in the spring of 2006—was 400,000 excess deaths in the 2003-2006 period, and there was still a lot of killing to come. By using data on widows, displaced persons (up to 5 million), and the household surveys, I estimate the number of war-related dead to be at least 600,000 and possibly as much as one million.
This is not a number that most American politicians want to consider. What’s more puzzling is the reaction of the news media, which have generally failed to report on the war’s destruction. Even as the U.S. military exits Iraq, the news media’s treatment focuses on American soldiers returning home or questions the future stability of Iraq in the absence of U.S. troops. There is very little on how the war has affected ordinary Iraqis.
On Afghanistan, a far less violent conflict compared with Iraq, we have even less information. The U.N. office gathers data from morgues, the military and news reports, but this “passive surveillance” captures only a fraction of the war dead and cannot explain what is being missed. No household surveys have been conducted in Afghanistan. So we have only the sketchiest notions of the war’s human toll. (This was also true of the wars in Korea and Indochina, where estimates are largely guesswork.) Overall, my best estimate of excess deaths in Afghanistan is around 100,000, but it is an inadequate estimate, as all are for this beleaguered country.
The Illusion of Validity
The low numbers the news media and political leaders use to describe the outcome of these wars provide an unintentional symmetry to the conflicts: the conflicts began under an illusion of validity, to borrow a phrase from psychologist Daniel Kahneman, which in Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s purported “weapons of mass destruction” and in Afghanistan was the purported hot pursuit of Osama bin Laden. Now the wars wind down under another illusion of validity, which is that the civilians harmed by the wars are relatively few. This is repeated so often, sometimes with reference to the Iraq Body Count or UN numbers, however hollow their credibility, that absurdly low estimates have become conventional wisdom. It is so much so that even the liberal media, like National Public Radio or the New York Times, rarely explore the human costs of the war to Iraqis or Afghanis.
These illusions, which feed indifference, have consequences. Others in the Muslim world particularly notice this callousness. It does not reflect well on America that many believe it to be a reckless bully unmindful of the havoc it wreaked, nor on Britain and Canada that they are camp followers of this recklessness.
The consequences for the United States are even more dramatic if considering the domestic political scene. By ignoring or forgetting the sheer destructiveness of the wars, Americans can continue on a path of seeing all foreign problems as fixable with military force. (Nowadays some domestic issues are regarded in the same light, with one result being the enormous homeland security apparatus.) This has been the tragic tendency of U.S. policy makers since 1945. The president is the commander-in-chief of the military, and as the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said of previous armed ventures, war above all nourishes the presidency. If there is no accountability for the human toll of war, the urge to deploy military assets will remain powerful.
Colin Powell famously said that invading a country means following the Pottery Barn rule, “If you break it, you own it.” The sad fact is that we broke Iraq and may be breaking Afghanistan, but we don’t “own it.” We scarcely recall that we ever had anything to do with it. As the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, the season of forgetting is upon us.
Widows in Iraq indicate scale of killing during U.S. war
The New York Times published a story in late November 2011 about widows' hardship in Iraq, a rare instance of of an account of how the war has affected ordinary people in Iraq. The reporter states that 86,000 war widows are getting assistance from the Iraqi government, and that this "corresponds with conservative estimates of 103,000 to 113,000 Iraqi deaths in the war."
This supposition is typical of the news media nowadays, which regularly reports the lowest estimates for war mortality. Consider the 86,000 figure supporting the 103-113,000 death toll. Half of the men in Iraq are not married. A very large number of men who are killed in the violence are young, far less than the average age of first marriage, which is 25 years old in Iraq. Many children are killed or die unnecessarily due to poor health care conditions. Women also die in war; approximately 10% of violent deaths were women.
Not all war widows are getting benefits, moreover. As this earlier and more complete report from Reuters details, "Iraqi women say registering for government pensions is a bureaucratic nightmare due to corrupt workers who demand money to complete the paperwork. One divorcee said she spent almost a year registering and when she was about to finish the process the pension office told her that her file had been lost. She gave up." The 2009 law to compensate widows was only put into effect last summer, so the numbers of women who have not even been registered is unknown and possibly very large.
This one metric, then--numbers of war widows, estimated to be 2 million for all wars--indicates a minimum of 250,000 deaths due to the war, not 100,000. Given that we do not know how many women will claim benefits, the actual figure is likely two to three times that. (Nov. 28)
Reports on displaced paint grim picture of poverty and status
Recent reports on Iraqis displaced by war show a chronic disaster. In a Brookings-LSE account, for example, scholar Elizabeth Ferris writes: "The governments of the region have generally allowed them to remain but haven’t recognized them as refugees nor given them formal residency rights. Not yet persuaded that it’s safe to return to their country, they live in limbo." UNHCR, the UN agency for refugees, noted in a July report that "an estimated 1.3 million IDPs are in Iraq. 467,565 IDPs and destitute persons reside in 382 settlements countrywide. The conditions in the settlements are extremely poor." Only one in eight of Iraqi displaced persons has returned to their homes since the violence subsided in 2008, says the agency. One reason for the trickle of returnees may be the Iraqi economy: Another U.N. agency says that more than half of all Iraqis live in “slum conditions,” compared with 17 percent in 2000. (Sept. 30)
..much more...
Welcome
Conventional wisdom in American politics focuses only on American costs in the war in Iraq: the casualties to U.S. soldiers, the financial costs, and sometimes the strategic costs. But the human cost to the Iraqis themselves are nearly ignored in political discourse, the news media, and intellectual circles. This site is a corrective to those oversights. We present empirical reports, studies, and other accounts that convey and assess the consequences of war for the people of Iraq.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Looking Back on Ten Years of War, Trauma, Death, & Displacement
Major studies of war mortality
Three major studies of war mortality have been done in Iraq. Two appeared in The Lancet, the British medical journal, and one appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. They bear strong similarities in their findings, but have some important differences, too.
The first household survey that appeared was published in The Lancet in October 2004, measuring the war-related mortality in the war's first 18 months. The researchers--mainly epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and medical personnel in Iraq--estimated 98,000 "excess deaths" due to war. Read
The second household survey, conducted by the Hopkins scientists again, was completed in June 2006 and published four months later in The Lancet. Its findings: 650,000 people (civilians and fighters) died as a result of the war in Iraq. Read
Another household survey, this one conducted by the Iraq Ministry of Health at the same time as the second Hopkins study, found 400,000 excess deaths, 151,000 by violence. As is the case with most such surveys conducted during time of war, there were problems in data gathering and the analysis tended to minimize violent death estimates. But the survey generally confirmed the very high mortality reported in The Lancet. Read
It should be noted that both the second Lancet article and the New England Journal of Medicine article were based on studies that were completed at the height of war-related violence in Iraq. Large-scale fighting continued for another year and slowly subsided for a year after that to lower but continuing levels. So their estimates are a fraction of the total caused by the war.
In 2008, the peer-reviewed journal, Conflict and Health, published "Iraq War Mortality Estimates: A Systematic Review," and found that the household survey method was superior to other forms of counting.
Other Estimates
Several other attempts have been made to estimate the war dead, and particularly civilians killed by violence. Iraq Body Count is the most well known. It counted individuals reported in English-language newspapers, mainly, which severely limited its scope. Similarly, the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index and the U.N. office in Iraq used "passive surveillance" methods (reports from morgues as well as newspapers). The problem with these methods is that they only capture part of the total picture (as with mrgue statistics), their "surveillance instrument" (i.e., newspapers) change over time, and so on. (See the discussion of methods in the Conflict and Health article cited above.) They are mainly useful for viewing trends. Wikileaks also released U.S. military data in 2010, but this was also quite partial--reports from U.S. military personnel.
In 2013, a group of scholars at Columbia University's School of Public Health published a comparison of the Wikileaks and Iraq Body Count estimates, and found a small percentage of single reported deaths overlapping--indicating that the total dead was significantly higher than either estimate held.
Displacement: Refugees and internally displaced
The number of displaced persons, both internal (within Iraq) and external (refugees, mainly in Jordan and Syria) ranged from estimates of 3.5 million to 5 million or more, which were directly attributable to the war. Virtually all first-hand accounts blamed violence as the cause of moving, or threats of ethnic or sectarian cleansing of neighborhoods.
The ravages of displacement, which remains at about 3 million, are bad enough. But it is also another indicator of the scale of mortality. All wars since 1945 have ratios of displaced to fatalities of 10:1 or less, typically more in the range of 5:1. If this typical ratio holds for the Iraq War, that indicates mortality of about one million Iraqis.
- Maps of displacement inside Iraq (up to 2011)
- According UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, the total number of internally displaced equals more than 1.3 million, and the number of refugees exceeds 1.4 million. Total "persons of concern" exceed 3 million. UNHCR web site
- Analysis of internally displaced crisis by International Rescue Committee, a major NGO (March 2013)
- An assessment of IDP situation by the Middle East Institute (Oct 2012)
- Iraqi Refugee Stories - first-hand accounts (video)
- Analysis and advocacy on Iraqi refugees from Human Rights First
Health Effects of War
Health-related impacts on children in Iraq, from the Brussels Tribunal and Global Research, Canada, dewscribes the broad effects on children, including birth defects, cancer, denial of rights, etc. (February 2013).
Environmental Contaminants from War Remnants in Iraq, a well-documented 2011 report that focuses mainly on depleted uranium and its carcinogenic qualities
"Effects of the War on Nutrition and Health...in Children," measured effects empirically in the mot violent areas (2009) and found profound impacts on children's health.
Birth defects in Fallujah, Iraq, rise markedly, says a 2011 medical study. Fallujah, the largest city in Anbar province, was the scene of two enormous battles between US forces and "insurgents."
Metal contamination: "Within less than a decade, the occurrence of congenital birth defects increased by an astonishing 17-fold in the same hospital." Medical study, 2012.
PREVIOUS NEWS & COMMENT
End of U.S. troops occasions minor reflection on war & destruction
The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq has spurred little new information on the scale of destruction in the 8 year, 8 month war. Professor Juan Cole had this to say:
The American public still for the most part has no idea what the United States did to that country, and until we Americans take responsibility for the harm we do others with our perpetual wars, we can never recover from our war sickness, which drives us to resort to violence in international affairs in a way no other democracy routinely does.
Population of Iraq: 30 million.
Number of Iraqis killed in attacks in November 2011: 187
Average monthly civilian deaths in Afghanistan War, first half of 2011: 243
Percentage of Iraqis who lived in slum conditions in 2000: 17
Percentage of Iraqis who live in slum conditions in 2011: 50
Number of the 30 million Iraqis living below the poverty line: 7 million.
Number of Iraqis who died of violence 2003-2011: 150,000 to 400,000.
Orphans in Iraq: 4.5 million.
Orphans living in the streets: 600,000.
Number of women, mainly widows, who are primary breadwinners in family: 2 million.
Iraqi refugees displaced by the American war to Syria: 1 million
Internally displaced [pdf] persons in Iraq: 1.3 million
Proportion of displaced persons who have returned home since 2008: 1/8
Rank of Iraq on Corruption Index among 182 countries: 175
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMMENT: From the Canadian International Council website, John Tirman, wrote (Dec. 16, 2011):
War has a powerful impact on those who have lived through one, bending every calculation, every thought, every action to the possible consequences of violence, deprivation, displacement and the other ravages of conflict. Oddly, war has become a distant occurrence for most of us in the industrialized West. The armed forces of Canada and the United States are all-volunteer and have been for many years, so very few who are unwilling to go to war or work in war zones are actually forced to experience its maelstrom.
But the people who live in war zones do, of course. Many millions of them are directly affected by the violence, now for more than a decade in Afghanistan in its latest war and for nearly nine years in Iraq in a war that followed 12 years of crippling sanctions and the short but intense Operation Desert Storm.
And there’s the rub: war devastates these places, but to us they are remote and largely forgettable. The amount of public attention to Afghanistan and Iraq has declined steadily. We scarcely pay attention to what has happened to the native populations. There are, perhaps, political and psychological reasons for this indifference—a turning away from the violence, a mission gone bad, falsehoods proffered by politicians, and many others. But the indifference is unmistakable. The news media rarely describes the ruinous consequences of U.S. policy and war-making for Afghanis and Iraqis. Few, if any, novels, films or other cultural expressions attempt to capture this suffering either.
This broad tendency to forget, or intentionally put aside, the ravages of war was evident during and after the Korean War (1950-53) and the Indochina wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1960s and early ’70s. But we forget at our peril. We should care about what happens to these people and their societies, not only for moral reasons, but also because forgetting has consequences.
Counting the Dead
One symptom of this indifference is the absence of an adequate accounting of the wars’ destruction, particularly of war mortality. The governments don’t discuss it, and the news media reliably report the lowest conceivable numbers—“tens of thousands” is the usual formulation for Iraq – or the partial numbers collated by the U.N. office in Kabul for Afghanistan. In fact, the numbers of fatalities are significantly higher and need to be studied for their implications.
In Iraq, some brave attempts to collect and analyze data about war-related mortality have at least given us a sense of the scale of mayhem. Several household surveys, the state-of-the-art method favored by epidemiologists, indicate a death toll reaching well into the hundreds of thousands. (This includes all Iraqis, not just civilians, from direct violence and indirectly due to other factors – so-called excess deaths above the pre-war mortality rate.) Even the oft-cited tally of Iraq Body Count, a U.K.-based NGO, holds that more than 100,000 civilians have died as a result of violence. IBC’s method is crude and incomplete—it gathers data mainly from English-language newspapers—and they acknowledge an undercount by at least a factor of two. The lowest estimate of all the household surveys—a large, randomized sample conducted by the Ministry of Health in the spring of 2006—was 400,000 excess deaths in the 2003-2006 period, and there was still a lot of killing to come. By using data on widows, displaced persons (up to 5 million), and the household surveys, I estimate the number of war-related dead to be at least 600,000 and possibly as much as one million.
This is not a number that most American politicians want to consider. What’s more puzzling is the reaction of the news media, which have generally failed to report on the war’s destruction. Even as the U.S. military exits Iraq, the news media’s treatment focuses on American soldiers returning home or questions the future stability of Iraq in the absence of U.S. troops. There is very little on how the war has affected ordinary Iraqis.
On Afghanistan, a far less violent conflict compared with Iraq, we have even less information. The U.N. office gathers data from morgues, the military and news reports, but this “passive surveillance” captures only a fraction of the war dead and cannot explain what is being missed. No household surveys have been conducted in Afghanistan. So we have only the sketchiest notions of the war’s human toll. (This was also true of the wars in Korea and Indochina, where estimates are largely guesswork.) Overall, my best estimate of excess deaths in Afghanistan is around 100,000, but it is an inadequate estimate, as all are for this beleaguered country.
The Illusion of Validity
The low numbers the news media and political leaders use to describe the outcome of these wars provide an unintentional symmetry to the conflicts: the conflicts began under an illusion of validity, to borrow a phrase from psychologist Daniel Kahneman, which in Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s purported “weapons of mass destruction” and in Afghanistan was the purported hot pursuit of Osama bin Laden. Now the wars wind down under another illusion of validity, which is that the civilians harmed by the wars are relatively few. This is repeated so often, sometimes with reference to the Iraq Body Count or UN numbers, however hollow their credibility, that absurdly low estimates have become conventional wisdom. It is so much so that even the liberal media, like National Public Radio or the New York Times, rarely explore the human costs of the war to Iraqis or Afghanis.
These illusions, which feed indifference, have consequences. Others in the Muslim world particularly notice this callousness. It does not reflect well on America that many believe it to be a reckless bully unmindful of the havoc it wreaked, nor on Britain and Canada that they are camp followers of this recklessness.
The consequences for the United States are even more dramatic if considering the domestic political scene. By ignoring or forgetting the sheer destructiveness of the wars, Americans can continue on a path of seeing all foreign problems as fixable with military force. (Nowadays some domestic issues are regarded in the same light, with one result being the enormous homeland security apparatus.) This has been the tragic tendency of U.S. policy makers since 1945. The president is the commander-in-chief of the military, and as the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said of previous armed ventures, war above all nourishes the presidency. If there is no accountability for the human toll of war, the urge to deploy military assets will remain powerful.
Colin Powell famously said that invading a country means following the Pottery Barn rule, “If you break it, you own it.” The sad fact is that we broke Iraq and may be breaking Afghanistan, but we don’t “own it.” We scarcely recall that we ever had anything to do with it. As the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, the season of forgetting is upon us.
Widows in Iraq indicate scale of killing during U.S. war
The New York Times published a story in late November 2011 about widows' hardship in Iraq, a rare instance of of an account of how the war has affected ordinary people in Iraq. The reporter states that 86,000 war widows are getting assistance from the Iraqi government, and that this "corresponds with conservative estimates of 103,000 to 113,000 Iraqi deaths in the war."
This supposition is typical of the news media nowadays, which regularly reports the lowest estimates for war mortality. Consider the 86,000 figure supporting the 103-113,000 death toll. Half of the men in Iraq are not married. A very large number of men who are killed in the violence are young, far less than the average age of first marriage, which is 25 years old in Iraq. Many children are killed or die unnecessarily due to poor health care conditions. Women also die in war; approximately 10% of violent deaths were women.
Not all war widows are getting benefits, moreover. As this earlier and more complete report from Reuters details, "Iraqi women say registering for government pensions is a bureaucratic nightmare due to corrupt workers who demand money to complete the paperwork. One divorcee said she spent almost a year registering and when she was about to finish the process the pension office told her that her file had been lost. She gave up." The 2009 law to compensate widows was only put into effect last summer, so the numbers of women who have not even been registered is unknown and possibly very large.
This one metric, then--numbers of war widows, estimated to be 2 million for all wars--indicates a minimum of 250,000 deaths due to the war, not 100,000. Given that we do not know how many women will claim benefits, the actual figure is likely two to three times that. (Nov. 28)
Reports on displaced paint grim picture of poverty and status
Recent reports on Iraqis displaced by war show a chronic disaster. In a Brookings-LSE account, for example, scholar Elizabeth Ferris writes: "The governments of the region have generally allowed them to remain but haven’t recognized them as refugees nor given them formal residency rights. Not yet persuaded that it’s safe to return to their country, they live in limbo." UNHCR, the UN agency for refugees, noted in a July report that "an estimated 1.3 million IDPs are in Iraq. 467,565 IDPs and destitute persons reside in 382 settlements countrywide. The conditions in the settlements are extremely poor." Only one in eight of Iraqi displaced persons has returned to their homes since the violence subsided in 2008, says the agency. One reason for the trickle of returnees may be the Iraqi economy: Another U.N. agency says that more than half of all Iraqis live in “slum conditions,” compared with 17 percent in 2000. (Sept. 30)
..much more...
6 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
a long decade... 