Iraqi Dead Estimated at 100,000

I know, I know. It's Election Day. I should be wringing my hands (OK, I am), engaging in nervous eating (check!), and making optimistic predictions (Kerry will win the popular vote and the electoral college).

But I thought I would address the crimes against humanity that we have perpetrated against the Iraqi people in our zeal to bring them democracy.

A recent study by the U.K.'s Lancet medical journey estimates that 100,000 non-combatant Iraqis have died in the 18 months since we invaded Iraq in March 2003. Without going into the details of the survey methodology (The Guardian has more info), it is certainly better than the complete lack of information provided by the "Coalition" forces.

This is 0.4% of the Iraqi population, which would be equivalent to 1.2 million American. Imagine that!

When I recently brought this statistic up to a friend (Bush supporter), his response was:

• Well, we would expect civilian deaths if we were invaded, too.
  When I mentioned that we invaded Iraq without cause, and that there would be an unbelievable outcry if we lost 1.2 million people due to some invasion or attack; where was the equivalent outcry about the injustic to the Iraqis? We are blind to our own destruction.
  
• The next response was: Saddam was a danger to us. We need to get rid of tyrants. What if we had gotten rid of Hitler in 1933?
  Oy, the Hitler argument. I completely absolutely totally reject the equivalency of Saddam to Hitler. I agree that Hitler was a danger, and we fought a long and bloody war to rid the world of him. Saddam was not a danger to us, though, any more than Pol Pot, or Robert Mugabe. Saddam was contained. He had no weapons programs. He was a bad baddie, but he was not a danger to the U.S. I could make a good case that we should be more worried about Kim Jung Il or Musharif where we have real documented evidence of nuclear weapons.
  
• The last point: Saddam was murderous thug to his people, and he killed far more people and would keep on killing them unless we stopped him. There were 300,000 bodies found in mass graves -- women and children.
  This put me in a difficult spot, because I ain't going to start definding Saddam Hussein. But that 300,000 number seemed awfully big. But being open-minded, I wanted to check out the sources for that. I could find a lot of sources for the 300,000 number, which seemed to originate at Human Rights Watch, which estimated 290,000 Iraqis dead in mass graves. But that was from May 2003, right after we "won" the war. Since then we've had a chance to find all the mass graves (and the WMD). So what's the latest?

There are many many many sources who repeat (or even expand) Saddam's death toll at 300,000, but not a single stitch of post-invasion documentation of that number. There is certainly recent evidence of mass graves, and women and babies in them. CNN reports finding hundreds of bodies in October 2004. The article repeats the 300,000 murdered estimate, but gives no support for it.

But there was a single article in July 2004 in the Observer that stated:

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.

The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves.

So far, I haven't found this same story in any U.S. newspaper. I'm still waiting for evidence.