Iraq's civilian dead: why US won't do the maths

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/iraqs-civilian-dead-why-us-wont-do-the-maths/2008/03/20/1205602581835.html

The Americans learnt one lesson from Vietnam: don't count the innocent casualties.

Jonathan Steele and Suzanne Goldenberg report.

Lieutenant-General Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan during his time as head of US Central Command, once announced, "We don't do body counts." This blunt response to a question about civilian casualties was an attempt to distance George Bush's wars from the disaster of Vietnam. One of the rituals of that earlier conflict was the daily announcement of how many Vietnamese fighters US forces had killed. It was supposed to convince a sceptical American public that victory was coming. But the "body count" concept sounded callous - and never more so than when it emerged that many of the alleged guerilla dead were in fact women and children civilians.

Iraq was going to be different. The US would count its own dead (now close to 4000), but the toll the war was taking on Iraqis was not a matter the Pentagon or any other US government department intended to quantify. Especially once Mr Bush had declared "mission accomplished" on May 1, 2003. After that, every new Iraqi who died by violence would be a signal he was wrong, and would show that a war conducted in the name of humanitarian intervention was exacting a mounting humanitarian toll of its own.

But people were dying, and every victim had a name and a family. Wedding parties were bombed by US planes; couples driving home at night were shot at checkpoints because they missed a light warning them to stop. In the last three weeks of April 2003, after Saddam's statue and his regime were toppled, US forces killed at least 266 civilians - a pattern of shooting as a first resort that has continued to this day.

So five years after Mr Bush and Tony Blair launched the invasion, no one knows how many Iraqis have died. We do know that more than 2 million have fled abroad. A further 1.5 million have sought safety elsewhere in Iraq. We know that the combined horror of car bombs, suicide attacks, sectarian killing and disproportionate US counter-insurgency tactics and air strikes has produced the worst humanitarian catastrophe in today's world. But the exact death toll remains a mystery.

There is no shortage of estimates, but they vary enormously. The Iraqi ministry of health initially tried to keep a count based on morgue records but then stopped releasing figures under pressure from the US-supported government in the green zone. The director of the Baghdad morgue, already under stress because of the mounting horror of his work, was threatened with death on the grounds that by publishing statistics he was causing embarrassment. The families of the bereaved wanted him to tell the truth, but like other professionals he came to the view that he had to flee Iraq.

[whistle]

1. When the truth comes out it will be Bush's holocaust and America's shame

... 8.0 million dead and missing Iraqi citizens and the numbers grow by the days, weeks, months and years

[bobthedrummer]

2. MIT/John Hopkins pdf: The Human Cost of the War in Iraq: A Mortality Study 2002-2006

http://web.mit.edu/humancostiraq/reports/human-cost-war-101106.pdf

[GreenTea]

3. BushCo won't allow showing of the fighting & deaths, nor caskets, they remember how the Vietnam war

started to turn with the showing of the real war on television, the unfair draft - and because of Vietnam there is no draft now, if there was a draft and the republicans know, they learned from Vietnam....there would again absolutely be massive revolt and protests in the streets....So BushCo certainly is not going to "count" show or tell us how many Iraqi civilians have been killed....They offer no fuel to get people enraged and their media does as told because they are all republican owned, all five (only five) of the news organizations. They feed us their made up info, we are not allowed to see anything not authorized as they steal and greedily make profits on their tidy tidy wars for profit....telling us all is going well, ignore it we're in control, go back to your lives.

Yes indeed they learned well from Vietnam, how to deceive, steal and keep the profits rolling along!

[bobthedrummer]

4. .

[riverdeep]

5. They feel invincible as long as they control the message.

That's why Helen Thomas is considered such a pain by the White House Press officers, she tries to go behind the smokescreen. They don't even need a solid story. All they need is plausible denial-as long as someone can come up with a respectable version of the story, they can just say, 'well, opinions differ'.

Of course, those people providing plausible denial are bought and paid for...

[slipslidingaway]

6. K&R thanks n/t