One Utah

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously remarked in November 2003, “We don’t do body counts on other people.” At the time, I thought he was just trying to avoid comparing the Iraq fiasco with the Vietnam fiasco. But perhaps the Pentagon just doesn’t want to know what we have done to the Iraqis.

A new poll by ORB, the British polling agency that has been tracking public opinion in Iraq since 2005, indicates a total of 1,220,580 civilian and combatant deaths since the invasion in 2003. Field workers asked residents how many members of their own household had been killed since the invasion. More than one in five respondents said that at least one person in their home had died as a result of violence since March of 2003.

Writing on AlterNet, Joshua Holland notes that most Americans won’t believe these numbers:

Americans were asked in an AP poll conducted earlier this year how many Iraqi civilians they thought had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation, and the median answer they gave was 9,890. That’s less than a third of the number of civilian deaths confirmed by U.N. monitors in 2006 alone.

Most of that disconnect is probably a result of American exceptionalism — the United States is, by definition, the good guy, and good guys don’t launch wars of choice that result in over a million people being massacred. Never mind that that’s exactly what the data show; acknowledging as much creates intolerable cognitive dissonance for most Americans, so as a nation, we won’t.

Of course, one can argue that most of these deaths were the result of Iraqis killing Iraqis. But that would be a moral cop-out, and it may not even be true. A study by Johns-Hopkins found that coalition forces were directly responsible for 56 percent of the deaths in which the perpetrator was known.

Holland, again:

If it weren’t for the layers of denial that have been dutifully built up around the American strategic class, these figures might put to rest the notion that U.S. troops are preventing more deaths than they cause.

This is sobering reading, especially coming the week after we were told over and over that Americans are bringing more security to Iraq. It was a lie, we knew already that Iraqi civilian deaths are way up this year.

This entry was posted Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Disaster, Iraq, National Politics, War, War Crimes. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.