Thursday, October 12, 2006
Iraq Body Count
Tomorrow I'm removing the Iraq Body Count graphic that's been displayed at bottom right for a long time. I doubt anyone noticed it much anyway. It was always obvious the organization used cautious methods of counting, & for several years it may have been understandable. They had good intentions. I'd read earlier criticisms of the IBC, which were answered by them, if not in an entirely convincing way. But the recent Johns Hopkins study has fully convinced me casualties are so much higher, so much worse as to make the IBC graphic dangerously misleading. Civilian deaths are in the hundreds of thousands, not tens of thousands. Certainly far above the current IBC count of around 50,000. Taking the lowest possible number given by the new study & halving it still adds up to nearly 200,000 deaths, which may be an optimistic number to me. There's no way I'm going to believe White House & Iraqi health ministry estimates.
Nobody knows how many people died in our Civil War. Walt Whitman said, "The real war will never get in the books." Whitman was terribly affected by the thought of dying alone & anonymously, just disappearing, which he knew was happening not only at the edges of the large & small battlefields of that war where mortally wounded men crawled away to die in thickets, but also all across the South, wherever there was hunger, sickness, refugees, the collapse of local government, marauding soldiers cut loose from their armies. Wherever there is civil war, which is deadly enough, there are people who will use the anarchy as a cover for murder, for gangsterism, for vigilantism, for settling vendettas, for personal gain at any cost to others. Such is happening daily in Iraq. The battlefield is everywhere.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Nobody knows how many people died in our Civil War. Walt Whitman said, "The real war will never get in the books." Whitman was terribly affected by the thought of dying alone & anonymously, just disappearing, which he knew was happening not only at the edges of the large & small battlefields of that war where mortally wounded men crawled away to die in thickets, but also all across the South, wherever there was hunger, sickness, refugees, the collapse of local government, marauding soldiers cut loose from their armies. Wherever there is civil war, which is deadly enough, there are people who will use the anarchy as a cover for murder, for gangsterism, for vigilantism, for settling vendettas, for personal gain at any cost to others. Such is happening daily in Iraq. The battlefield is everywhere.
