« Jonathan Chait Loses It | Main | U.N. Reform: It's Time For The Big Stick »
July 24, 2005
Some New Light On Iraqi Civilian Deaths
It is axiomatic among the anti-war Left that the US is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands innocent Iraqi civilians. If you believe the Lancet study, then the figure runs to over 100,000. There have been some pretty effective refutations of the Lancet figure, but the remaining estimates, according to sites like Iraq Body Count, still tend to hover at around 20,000.
I've been suspicious of a number even this high, assuming that number is supposed to represent deaths of a strictly collateral nature, i.e., truly innocent civilian bystanders. Anyone reading milblogs such as Armor Geddon can see for themselves the unprecedented care and control exercised in the use of deadly force--the US rules of engagement in this conflict would be considered insane by any WWII G.I. This, combined with the fact that the majority of the aerial bombing was done with precision guided munitions, led me (somewhat subconsciously) to regard even the lower estimate with a high degree of skepticism.
Now there's some welcome light on the subject. Rob Nordland, writing for the Newsweek website, has performed an extensive analysis of the data used to justify the figures presented by Iraq Body Count and the Lancet study.
But how often, really [have innocent Iraqis been killed by Coalition forces]? The answer: not very often, in fact. And not nearly often enough to make the 150,000 U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq the leading scourge of Iraq's civilians. That dishonor goes, hands down, to the insurgents. Even one incident is bad, of course, and there have been many. But civilian killings by U.S. troops are not nearly as common as the critics of the war in Iraq would like us to believe. It has become an article of faith among them that American troops have been slaughtering Iraqi civilians indiscriminately, and that one of the consequences of the war has been an unconscionable loss of life among the civilian population. It just isn't true.
Nordland goes on to meticulously examine the assumptions behind the figures. One such assumption is that every civilian death reported is actually a civilian. It is common knowledge that the uniformed Iraqi army faded into oblivion soon after the Coalition forces began their attack--most of the armed resistance came from fighters in civilian garb, contrary to the long-established rules of war. When these fighers were dispatched, they were invariably reported as civilians by their relatives. Nordland notes that given the fact that these irregulars were also using mosques, hospitals, and schools as cover it's a wonder there weren't many more civilian casualties.
Nordland's main point is that the insurgents are responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths in the Iraq conflict, and he shows that IBC is not exactly eager to highlight this fact.
The Iraq Body Count report goes through some interesting contortions to downplay the degree to which violence against civilians is predominantly caused by insurgent activity. U.S.-led forces alone, it says, killed 9,270 civilians, or 37.3 percent of the total (although it does not note at that point that 30 percent of that 37.3 percent was in the first six weeks of the war). Anti-occupation forces it blames for only 9.5 percent of the total, 2,353 civilians. Crossfires between insurgents and U.S. forces claim another 2.5 percent. And then most of the other deaths it attributes to "predominantly criminal killings" (35.9 percent) and "unknown agents" (11 percent). But it turns out that unknown agents are defined in the report as "those who appear to attack civilian targets lacking a clear or unambiguous link to the foreign military presence in Iraq. This may include some overlap with the groups above as well as with criminal murders." In other words, terrorists and insurgents. And the "predominantly criminal killings" are all those recorded in mortuaries, subtracting the normal pre-war murder rate from the totals.
Talk about lies, damn lies and statistics. It's abundantly clear to anyone who has been in Iraq that the great majority of those murders are political assassinations, and most of those are by anti-occupation insurgents against any and everyone connected no matter how remotely to the U.S. occupation or the Iraqi authorities, from ministers to off-duty policemen to cleaning ladies.
As Nordland relates, he himself came within a trigger twitch of being shot by US troops in what would have been a classic case of mistaken identity in the fog of urban warfare, a tragic scenario no one argues has not occurred. The even greater tragedy is that the barbaric jihadists, who think nothing of exploding bombs deliberately among crowds of children, are not being held accountable to the degree they deserve.
Thanks to the always excellent Mark Coffey at Decision '08. This is an absolute must read.
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.thebernoullieffect.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/252
