It’s an estimate, taken from a smaller sample. The article gives a fairly thorough explanation of the method used.
Some estimates range below 30,000. On the other hand, 100,000 might not even scratch the surface.
If the planners could have figured that 100,000 non-combatants were likely to die as a result of invading Iraq given the stated goals, would they have ordered it? What number, if any, was on their ledger that would have made them say no? 10,000? 50? A million?
Ground rule: no justifying numbers saying “x number died during This Other War.”
Without actually questioning the folks involved, I don’t think there’s any way to answer this question. Though my cynical self suspects that the folks behind the war didn’t give a damn how many people (on either side) had to die for it.
It was unlcear from the article how many deaths were directly attributed to coalition action vs directly attributed to the actions of the insurgents. I’m not trying to use that a justification for the war-- I never thought it was a good idea to invade. But Iraq is pretty much Yugoslavia + oil. We all knew that going in. If the adminstration didn’t see it, that was because they chose not to see it. But at some point down the road, whether in 10 years or 50 years, S.H. or whoever took over after him would have been overthrown and the country would have had a civil war. Could the invasion have been handled better? No doubt. But the choice in Iraq seems to have been brutal dictator or civil war*. The latter was pretty much an inevitability.
*and I use that term loosely, because I don’t think we can quite call what is going on there civil war, yet. It may come to that at some point, but right now it seems to be violence without a political purpose other than getting rid of the Americans. There does not seem to be a plan by the insurgents for what comes after that, other than internal fighting among themselves and the rest of the Iraqis for control of either the whole country or some section of it.
The people who could say “no” did not plan the war. They received various reports on possible outcomes. It’s extremely likely any reasonable number of civilian casualties was included in those reports.
If we had people who cared about something like that, our army would not be in Iraq.
I can’t find a cite but it’s been my understanding that any action that was likely to result in more than 30 or 50 civilian deaths had to get Rumsfeld’s approval. The bombs hopefully lobbed into urban areas where Saddam might be staying or eating fell into that category.
I suppose that could count as ‘caring’ but not caring enough not to pass up the off-chance they might nail him.
Yes, I saw that. What’s the different between an “extra death” and a “violent death”? Maybe I’m dense, but I read that section 3 times and couldn’t figure it out.
I’ll be the first person to say George Bush and his gang are all war criminals and belong in prison and that their supporters are credulous goobers, but I find it curious that this 100,000 figure has suddenly popped up when all previous estimates ranged between 15,000 and 30,000. The Iraq Body Count site, which bases its totals on a lot of evidence, is around 20,000.
Always be suspicious of numbers that conveniently happen to be round powers-of-10 figures.
Iwould also agree with John Mace that any fair assessment would categorize deaths according to who actually started them. And I would agree that an Iraqi civil war was very likely a historical inevitability. Iraq was a state (it’s now a colony) but it was never really a nation.
So these are extra deaths above the baseline and it says that most of these were violent deaths and most of these as a result of our military action. So in my simplistic mind I take that to mean 100,000 dead civilians who would otherwise be alive if we had not dropped bombs on them, for whatever reason.
They were trying to measure the difference between the death rate before the war and after the war. The “extra deaths” refer to this difference. That is, they are saying that these deaths would not have occured if not for the war.
No - whoever fired the bullet, whoever dropped the bomb killed them, regardless of motives.
Unless of course we’re going to count car bomb death in the Occupation column. After all, they are just engaging the forces and their supporters that started it all by invading the country in the first place.
But where does it say the deaths are due to “our military action” as opposed to car bombs, ect. by the insurgents? Or are ALL violent deaths, regardless of who pulled the trigger being attributed to the US since we started the war? That may or may not be a valid assumption, but I’d at least like to know if that assumption is being made.
Yes, I think it was purely a health based study, which happened to find statistics such as that the risk of a violent death is now 58 times what it was under Saddam.
This report is not saying that 100,000 people were killed it’s saying that 100,000 more people have died than would have been expected to die in the same period before the war under Saddams administration. This covers all form of death both natural and from outside sources.
Drop bombs from planes, throw grenades, use machine guns and kill your enemies by the hundreds in a foreign country = justified casualties in the name of democracy
Cut your enemies head off with a sword one-by-one in your homeland = those soulless murdering animals
To be fair, a lot of the estimates of deaths under Saddam that I’ve seen have inculded things like children dying from malnourishment under the sanctions, Kurdish refugees dying from harsh conditions, etc.