Pentagon Challenge: Ask Iraqis How Many Have Died

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/14-1

Published on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

Pentagon Challenge: Ask Iraqis How Many Have Died

by Robert Naiman

The U.S. military is planning a large polling operation in Iraq over the next three years to help "build robust and positive relations with the people of Iraq and to assist the Iraqi people in forming a new government," Walter Pincus reports in the Washington Post.

This provides an excellent opportunity to revisit an important question:

How many Iraqis have died since the U.S. invasion?

<snip>

In particular, I think Congress should require the Pentagon to ask Iraqis the following questions:
"How many members of your household have died since March, 2003? How many members of your household have died since March, 2003 due to violence?"
Inclusion of these questions would allow the U.S. government to estimate how many Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invasion.

Not only should Congress require the Pentagon to ask these questions, but Congress should require the Pentagon to use the data so gathered to create estimates of Iraqi deaths since 2003, and of how many of those deaths were due to violence. And Congress should require that those numbers be reported to Congress.

When the "Lancet study" (that is, the Johns Hopkins study) estimated two years ago that 600,000 Iraqis had died, President Bush dismissed the study as "not credible," without offering his own estimate, or explaining why that estimate was "not credible."

Much ink has been spilled since then in the dispute over estimates of Iraqi casualties (relatively little, however, of that ink has been spilled in our corporate media in the United States.)

Just Foreign Policy publishes an extrapolation ( http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/iraqdeaths.html ) of the Lancet study, using the trend which can be inferred from the Iraq Body Count tally. If the Lancet study estimate was roughly correct, and if Iraq Body Count gives a roughly accurate trend, that would suggest more than a million deaths due to violence in Iraq since March 2003, over and above what would have occurred had there been no U.S. invasion.

thank you!

:)

when this piece gets no love.

As history shows, the more time passes, the harder it is to find the truth, making it easier on the war criminals

what we have done in Iraq is Genocide plain and simple. It is about fucking time the media reported it.

:(