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That comes from the Iraqi Human Rights Ministry. It’s a death toll resulting from violent incidents (“bombs, murders, fighting”) between 2004 and 2008. The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 and our military will depart at the end of 2011. So the war will have taken the lives of many more Iraqis than the 85,000 the ministry has announced.
I have always felt uncomfortable with any of the unofficial death-toll reporting in Iraq. The Lancet‘s high-high estimates — 100,000 by 2004 — made me queasy, and I spent time trying to be as respectful of its authors’ work as I could, because — you know, we should be vigilant about acknowledging deaths that we cause. The critics of the Lancet often seemed driven by the idea that it was inappropriate to acknowledge U.S.-caused deaths. Everyone here was political — it was as if our determination of reality was contingent on which argument would be bolstered or refuted. And these were people’s lives we were discussing.
The truth is we will probably never really know how many people died because of the Iraq war. The Iraqi capacity for counting the dead has been, to say the least, inconsistent. But now we have an official baseline total. The invasion and occupation killed at least 85,000 Iraqis and over 4000 Americans. Who can honestly say it was worth that cost?
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Go to HumanEvents.com and go into either an Ann Coulter thread or a Buchannen thread. Try Buchannen’s most recent thread there, The Affirmative Action Nobel, and ask your questions on if it was honestly worth that cost and you’ll get your answer. Ask them if Iraqi lives are worth anything.
There’s a portion of this country that doesn’t give a damn about live after birth, especially if they aren’t WASP’s.
I wouldn’t trust that number at all. Even McCain has said hundreds of thousands,and millions displaced. ‘Iraqi Human Rights Ministry’ sounds like an oxymoron to me.
This number seems ridiculously low–out of keeping with most other estimates I’ve seen. In 2006 the Minister of Health used a method that put the total around 130,000–back then. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/10/AR2006111000164_pf.html.
Actually all of these death totals tell us very little. Throughout the Iraq conflict the combatants fighting the war could be divided between those who deliberately sought to maximize civilian deaths (Qaeda, Baathists, Iranian backed militias) and those forces, particularly since 2007, who sought to protect the population from those forces (US military, competent, uncorrupted Iraqi military units). If you seek to make the political and moral point about whether all of this was worth it, then you have to account for the death toll and general deprivation toll of continued baathist rule. How many atrocities would have been committed by Saddam or his sons against Iraqis between 2003 and the present? Between 62 and 78 million people died as a result of world war 2. Surely fewer people would have died had the US stayed out of the war, even fewer would have died if Britain and France did not intervene. But do we judge that war a failure based on the casualties alone? It’s possible that Saddam Hussein would have only menaced his own population and would not have tried to invade more countries, as he did in Kuwait and Iran.
No, Lake, you don’t really have to account for the costs of continued Ba’athist rule in your moral calculation.
Think some more about that very hollow contention.
Apparently you think we had nothing to do with the rise of Saddam to power, supporting him during the Iran Iraq war, selling him wheat credits as he was cleansing Kurds from the grain rich north, then sanctioning Iraq as the guarantor of the cease fire that ended the 1991 Gulf War. It’s very easy to make easy political claims about the war if you have no appreciation of the history that preceded it.
Spencer,
You said:
Not true, by any reasonable standard of ‘really know’. If you mean ‘be able to establish the cause of every individual death that occurred in Iraq during the time of the war’, then, we will never know. If you mean ‘arrive at reasonable, statistically valid estimate of the excess deaths in Iraq during the time of the war’, then yes, that is possible. If you mean, reach a social and political consensus that recognizes the truth about the casualty count, then, no that will never happen because there are very powerful political forces that have a vested interest in minimizing the number of deaths (and, to much lesser extent, forces that prefer to inflate the number).
No, Lake. You’re quite simply adding irrelevant info to the calculation, unless it’s demonstrable that the Ba’athists were our creatures.
You also might to well to avoid suggesting that people rejecting your arguments do so out of ignorance.
It merely makes your head appear swollen.
To step in between these two combatants, both of whom I have great affection for, I would say that unless we can establish the premise that the U.S. had a moral obligation to invade and depose Saddam Hussein’s regime, the point Eli is making can’t get off the ground. Proving that obligation exists is, in my view, impossible.
For a little comparison, Brookings’ Iraq Index counted 101,709 dead for the same period as this Human Rights Ministry report, while Iraq Body Count had 85,903, so the Ministry’s numbers seem pretty reasonable. As for the the Lancet study, I never believed those numbers when it first came out and as I researched it more, they get less and less credible. They’ve been basically discredited since then, and they refuse to share their polling data or answer basic questions about their work.