This is a sobering and shocking number: just shy of 1,000,000 Iraqis have been killed since the U.S.-led invasion began. This estimate was just published by Just Foreign Policy. While most of the focus in this country is on the U.S. casualties–every single one of them unnecessary and tragic–it’s important that we remember the devastation brought to Iraq on the part of the president and vice-president and the rest of the gang.
Just Foreign Policy builds on the estimate put out and updated by Lancet, the respected British medical journal. That estimate, updated in July 2006, pegged the number of Iraqis killed at 650,000–deaths attributed to the invasion (that is, people who would not have died if the war had not occurred).
Here, in summary, is how JFP arrives at its updated figure:
For the Iraqi Death Estimator, Just Foreign Policy accepts the Lancet estimate of 601,000 violent Iraqi deaths attributable to the U.S. invasion and occupation as of July 2006.
To update this number, we need to obtain a rate of how quickly deaths are mounting in Iraq. For this purpose, the Iraq Body Count (IBC) provides the most reliable, frequently updated database of deaths in Iraq. (The IBC also usefully provides a database of all violent Iraqi deaths demonstrable through press reports and thus relatively undeniable.) The IBC provides a maximum and minimum. We opted to use the midpoint between the two for our calculation.
We multiple the Lancet number as of July 2006 by the ratio of current IBC deaths divided by IBC deaths as of July 1, 2006 (43,394).
The formula used is:
Just Foreign Policy estimate = (Lancet estimate as of July 2006) * ( (Current IBC Deaths) / (IBC Deaths as of July 1, 2006) )
This is horrific, unimaginable and totally unnecessary. If we can’t impeach the president and vice-president in our country, it strikes me that these numbers, and the underlying reasons the war happened, should be enough to bring those two before some international body to be held accountable to the ravaging of a country and deaths of so many people. When the right tries to wave the bloody flag of mass deaths in other countries over the past half century, this carnage must be held up at the top of the pack.
Light a candle. And post the Iraqi death toll calculator JFP has anywhere you can.
