In fact, the numbers of fatalities are significantly higher and need to be studied for their implications. This is not a number that most American politicians want to consider. Even as the U. There is very little on how the war has affected ordinary Iraqis.
On Afghanistan, a far less violent conflict compared with Iraq, we have even less information. The U. No household surveys have been conducted in Afghanistan. This was also true of the wars in Korea and Indochina, where estimates are largely guesswork. Overall, my best estimate of excess deaths in Afghanistan is around ,, but it is an inadequate estimate, as all are for this beleaguered country. Now the wars wind down under another illusion of validity, which is that the civilians harmed by the wars are relatively few.
This is repeated so often, sometimes with reference to the Iraq Body Count or UN numbers, however hollow their credibility, that absurdly low estimates have become conventional wisdom. It is so much so that even the liberal media, like National Public Radio or the New York Times , rarely explore the human costs of the war to Iraqis or Afghanis.
These illusions, which feed indifference, have consequences. Others in the Muslim world particularly notice this callousness. It does not reflect well on America that many believe it to be a reckless bully unmindful of the havoc it wreaked, nor on Britain and Canada that they are camp followers of this recklessness.
The consequences for the United States are even more dramatic if considering the domestic political scene. By ignoring or forgetting the sheer destructiveness of the wars, Americans can continue on a path of seeing all foreign problems as fixable with military force. Nowadays some domestic issues are regarded in the same light, with one result being the enormous homeland security apparatus.
This has been the tragic tendency of U. The president is the commander-in-chief of the military, and as the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
If there is no accountability for the human toll of war, the urge to deploy military assets will remain powerful. As the U. The New York Times published a story in late November about widows' hardship in Iraq , a rare instance of of an account of how the war has affected ordinary people in Iraq.
The reporter states that 86, war widows are getting assistance from the Iraqi government, and that this "corresponds with conservative estimates of , to , Iraqi deaths in the war. Consider the 86, figure supporting the , death toll.
Half of the men in Iraq are not married. A very large number of men who are killed in the violence are young, far less than the average age of first marriage, which is 25 years old in Iraq. Many children are killed or die unnecessarily due to poor health care conditions. Not all war widows are getting benefits, moreover.
As this earlier and more complete report from Reuters details, "Iraqi women say registering for government pensions is a bureaucratic nightmare due to corrupt workers who demand money to complete the paperwork. One divorcee said she spent almost a year registering and when she was about to finish the process the pension office told her that her file had been lost.
She gave up. This one metric, then--numbers of war widows, estimated to be 2 million for all wars--indicates a minimum of , deaths due to the war, not , Given that we do not know how many women will claim benefits, the actual figure is likely two to three times that. Recent reports on Iraqis displaced by war show a chronic disaster. The conditions in the settlements are extremely poor.
One reason for the trickle of returnees may be the Iraqi economy: Another U. Among the consequences of war is the corrosion of social and institutional barriers to crime, and none is sadder than the rise of human trafficking. Iraq is apparently undergoing a spell of increasing trafficking, or at least more noticeable violations of sexual and labor trafficking.
A few weeks ago, the State Department issued its annual assessment of human trafficking worlwide, and Iraq was criticized for nearly non-existent enforcement of laws relating to both forced prostitution and involuntary labor servitude. Journalists reports confirm that the problems are acute and possibly growing.
August The nearly , documents released by the NGO muckraker, Wikileaks , on October 22, , shows greater brutality toward civilians than the U. Government and the news media have heretofore acknowledged. Rampaging security contractors like Xe and abuse of detainees are particularly notable. But the documents give the impression that fatalties in the war "only" totaled , or so, counting civilians killed by direct violence. This is misleading.
The New York Times and the Associated Press both used this "baseline" and asserted it to be in keeping with several other estimates. Active surveillance using randomized household surveys is a superior method, and in the two most recent, credible surveys, between , and , Iraqi deaths were estimated, including all Iraqis and all causes.
By multiplying those rates by the annual Iraq population, the researchers estimated that the "total excess deaths attributable to the war" up until mid to be about , They also estimated that an additional 56, deaths were not counted because of the emigration of households from Iraq.
These include the failures of health, sanitation, transportation, communication and other systems. The most common causes of non-violent deaths linked to the war were heart attacks or cardiovascular conditions, followed by infant or childhood deaths other than injuries, chronic illnesses and cancer.
When they do leave their homes to get medical care, they arrive at institutions overwhelmed with violent injuries," Amy Hagopian, associate professor of Global Health at the University of Washington and lead author of the paper, told NBC News. The Trump administration inherited ongoing military operations in Iraq. Overall, the conflict has cost the lives of over 4, American military members. The human toll for Iraqis is much greater: since March , there have been nearly , documented violent civilian deaths.
Civilian deaths are a tragic part of every war. But the number of civilian deaths in Iraq has varied significantly, from year to year and month to month, as the methods and circumstances of the war have changed.
This story seeks to give context to the data. The U. The campaign lasted until April and succeeded in decimating Saddam Hussein's military and government. But it was enormously destructive to civilians. Out of all civilian deaths caused directly by the U. At the time, some analysts argued that Iraq was in a state of civil war.
By , the American-led occupation had been facing an ongoing violent insurgency for years. But the vast majority of civilian deaths in and were caused by unknown actors—not organized insurgent groups or the American military.
On February 22, , terrorists bombed the al-Askari mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest sites in the world for Shi'ite Muslims. Civilian deaths were already common before this event, but they increased dramatically during the rest of and Grim reports of summary executions based on religious sect became commonplace.
Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. Daniel Brown.
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