Current mood:

disgusted

Ranting About The War
A report came out recently, putting the Iraq civilian casualty total at 100,000 people. That does more than anything to undermine the ‘humanitarian’ rationale for the war; I still can’t undertsand how so many news agencies refer to the situation as “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

There have been other counts; iraqbodycount.com puts to total much lower, between 15,000 and 17,000. But this is the miniumum number of deaths, since the website only measures deaths recorded by journalists.

The report, which is from the British medical journal The Lancet, takes a survey of 990 households and extrapolates the results to the rest of the population. The methodology of the survey looks very sound, and if anything, it seems too conservative

(1) "The deceased had to be living in the household at the time of death and for more than 2 months before to be considered a household death."

This doesn’t account for homeless deaths; also, in a nation with high poverty like Iraq, people tend to move around a lot, and a significant percentage may not have been at one place for two months at the time of the survey.

(2) "We assumed the population was living within a rectangle, with the dimensions corresponding to the distances spanned between the site coordinates in the GPS unit."

This randomness of finding households makes it so that researchers will probably not be put into the center of the geographical rectangle they were looking at, where most of the casualties would take place.

(3) The survey took place before the invasion of Fallujah.


Howard Zinn has written a lot about the war, specifically about how war is usually the result of people not fully acknowledging the equality of others. His argument has a couple of premises, neither of which I think is very controversial. The first is just that civilians are non-combatants; I suppose this is true by definition, but the idea is that civilians aren’t responsible for what their country is doing in war in a way that a soldier is. The second is that civilians, of any country, are equal (all other things being equal).

So take a situation like using the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The rationale is that it is worth it to bring the war to an end by killing 100,000 civilians. But if we accept Zinn’s premises, we can be presented with a different situation: If the Japanese announced that they would surrender if 100,000 American civilians were killed, would Americans say yes? Obviously not. But they would if 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed. This disparity can only be explained by denying one of Zinn’s premises, which I don’t think can be done rationally, as I see it now.

Take the situation in Iraq before the war. To justify the killing of 100,000 civilians I really think you would have to say that Iraq was a danger to more than 100,000 civilians. There are certainly benefits of the war; democracy, security for the future, things that aren’t easily quantifiable. But 100,000 people died. I just can’t get that number out of my head.

I never thought the war toll would be this high. I thought it would be in the tens of thousands, but certainly not past 100,000. 100,000 people dead. And all so fast. I wonder if the people who were so hung-ho for the war even thought 10,000 would die. And I wonder if they just didn't want to think about it.