100,000 Iraqi Civilians have died in current war

[lookout123]

yes, but in theory, they face consequences for ignoring the laws of the land.

[Undertoad]

Another number noted:

Iraq Puts Civilian Toll at 12,000 (wapo via yahoo)

Violence in the course of the 18-month-long insurgency has claimed the lives of 12,000 Iraqis, Interior Minister Bayan Jabr said Thursday, giving the first official count for the largest category of victims of bombings, ambushes and other increasingly deadly attacks.
...
Interior Ministry statistics showed 12,000 civilians killed by insurgents in the last year and a half, Jabr said. The figure breaks down to an average of more than 20 civilians killed by bombings and other attacks each day. Authorities estimate that more than 10,500 of the victims were Shiite Muslims, based on the locations of the deaths, Jabr said.

[Happy Monkey]

"by insurgents"

[richlevy]

My understanding is that it is not the policy of the US military to tally civilian deaths. They report obvious ones, when they deliberately shoot someone, but do not do an in-depth examination of collateral damage from bombing or shelling.

This incident comes to mind. Or was it all faked?


When the deaths are high profile enough, the US will acknowledge the incident.

Who's telling the truth? Can incidents that occur in the backwater of a country at war and in which jouranists cannot travel safely unless 'embedded' be accurately tallied?

Was the wedding video faked, or was the incident real and subjected to spin by the US to downplay fears about civilian casualties?

If anyone knows the answer, then I would say that they are lying, because without first-hand knowledge you are relying on one of a number of groups, all of whom have an agenda.

All I can say about Iraq is that the coalition does not control the ground. They have responded to attacks by creating rules which are difficult for civilians to obey. (Picture an invisible line 1000 feet from a police car. If you cross that line the cops can shoot at you. Now try to imagine having to look out for police cars at every intersection so that you are never any closer than 1000 feet from one. How soon before you screw up?) They are also relying on bombs, shells, and missiles to make up for a lack of manpower. How 'smart' are our bombs, shells, and missiles? Multiply that margin of error by 2 years.

The most accurate answer is 'more than a dozen and less than a million'.

The reason US casualties are so low, besides better medical care, is that the rules of engagement have been designed to maximize the protection of our troops. This comes at the price of a higher amount of 'collateral damage'.

It's us or them, and the them includes civilians. Even if the US military wanted to do a post action survey of casualties, they couldn't, because they don't really own any ground outside of the 'green zone' and bases. They only have enough time to pick up their casualties and leave. Their is no Iraq:CSI to sift through wrecked buildings and vehicles. They might get an unofficial count of the ones who die in hospitals, but for every one sent to a hospital there might be ten dead on the ground.

Noone knows. 30,000 sounds like a good estimate. Since I don't know about every operation out in the sticks, I couldn't say 100,000 was wrong. Certainly the people on both sides have an agenda. Certainly the current adminstration has a very solid record of twisting numbers into something they like to hear.

It may be that in 10 years CNN will be interviewing Iraqis in the Baghdad Starbucks and they will all agree that it was worth it and have no hard feelings about everything they went through and about the cousins who were killed by coalition bombs or detained and 'rigorously interrogated' by US forces. Personally, I doubt it.

[Undertoad]

Michael Yon details the battle for Mosul, which is fascinating. Part of the intro speaks to what I was saying about modern communcations in the beginning of this thread. Why there can't be a high number of deaths without people knowing about it:

If media access is the first reason for confidence in casualty reports, communication capacity is a close second. Iraq is no black hole. Contrary to most war zones, Iraq is more like a quasar, radiating information at an unprecedented rate. Most city-dwelling Iraqis have Internet access, and maintain chat-partners and websites. Wireless Internet is widely available and cell phones are both cheap and plentiful. My Iraqi cell number works fine. I did radio and newspaper interviews on it yesterday. Any resourceful schoolkid in Mosul could find someone's telephone number on the Internet, grab his dad's phone and call Germany, Japan or San Diego, just as easily as calling across town.

Given this incredible access to Iraq—and Iraq's access to the world—the probability of hiding large numbers of casualties, or of making them up, is minuscule. From the Coalition side, the Americans I've seen injured or killed were all reported by mainstream media, sometimes before everyone on base learned about it.

There is chaos and confusion in combat. But apart from that, the casualty reports printed in most newspapers or scrolled across most television or monitor screens accurately reflect what's happening on the ground here in Iraq. A "reasonable estimate" for the month of May, 2005, put war-deaths of Iraqis at about 700, with an additional 90 Coalition members killed in action. That’s roughly 800 people killed in May.

[tw]

Michael Yon's article reads like it was written in Vietnam. In fact, same claims were written just after the Vietnam Tet Offensive.

In each engagement, the Americans were decimating the enemy, chiseling off chunks of combatants, and seizing and destroying their weapons and explosives. The harder the enemy fought the more fighters they lost; they were facing a foe that was better equipped, more resilient, and a lot harder than the enemy expected. After months of intense fighting, Coalition forces changed the ground conditions dramatically. The Coalition now owns the open roads, while the enemy scrambles to hiding places in the alleys. The challenge has always been to hold Mosul without destroying the city. It remains the order of the day.

Mosul was a quiet town when the 101st Airborn took over. Locals even worked with the 101st to save a dam from destruction that would have flooded the entire town. Because Bremer and his White House assigned staff had no plans for the peace, the 101st commander took it upon himself to try to restore and rebuild the city. Bremer did not even have any staff people in Mosul. Either he regarded it as too dangerous or was too busy doing what we now know created the insurgency. Once the 101st Airborne left Mosul, there still were no plans for the peace from Bremer and George Jr. And so, one year later, the town broke down into chaos and violence. Police and National Guard all fled.

But things are getting better. There is more military force. The body counts are getting higher. Its not as bad this month as it was last month. In Vietnam, these same briefings were called the 5 o'clock follies. Things used to measure progress - more military force, more body counts, etc - really meant the war in Nam was being lost. Why is it be any different in Iraq? When do we start talking about light at the end of a tunnel. It took Americans about 7 years to finally admit what was well published in "Making of a Quagmire".

And yet, despite the clear progress, May came to a bloody close, with US and Iraqi casualties higher than in recent months. Although the enemy attacks were both less frequent and less grand, they were more deadly. With the supply of people willing to use their exploding skeletons as shrapnel to maim innocent women and children diminishing daily, not even hardliners count on the jihadist drive of the person strapped behind the wheel. The enemy has had to shift from high-casualty firefights to remotely detonated car bombs.

Why did Lt Calley's troops massacre the residents of My Lai? They got tired and frustrated of being attacked by booby traps. Booby traps, car bombs, or suicide bombers. What is the difference? The bottom line is the war is getting better - just as in Vietnam as proven in daily briefings from the 5 o'clock follies.

Somewhere deep in a dumpster in DC are the shredded remnants of an optimistic military plan for Iraq that had three steps: topple the government, replace it, and go home. With or without the throngs of liberated Iraqis tossing roses at the tanks, the plan did not work. The insurgency launched, and a Plan B—or C or D—has evolved to recruit and train Iraqis to secure and protect their own people, so that our people can go home. Getting our soldiers back home remains the primary end, and this latest articulation of the plan clearly is working.

IOW the George Jr administration had no plans for the peace. Same problem created by same people at the end of the Kuwait liberation. The same mistake that resulted in no fly zones, massacre of thousands in Basara even as the US Army sat five miles away just watching, the massacre of Kurds who were supposidely protected in a CIA training camp, etc. Major mistakes (repeated by the same people who also disbanned the Iraqi Army and Police) are predicted in a paper written by the UK government for Tony Blair:

Memo: U.S. Lacked Full Postwar Plan for Iraq
A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a "protracted and costly" postwar occupation of that country.

The eight-page memo, written in advance of a July 23, 2002, Downing Street meeting on Iraq, provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable, and realized more clearly than their American counterparts the potential for the post-invasion instability that continues to plague Iraq.