Michael Thieren writes, for openDemocracy:
Two scientifically audited numbers today constitute the best available and most cited evidence quantifying Iraqi civilian deaths directly associated with the war in that country which began in March 2003. Each is generated by a credible and independent source...one gives a running total of 48,783 (as of 18 October 2006), the other gives 654,965 for the period March 2003 to July 2006.
What to think? Therien observes:
These numbers differ in absolute terms largely because they are generated through two very different approaches, with their respective flaws. Methodologically, a passive compilation of fatal events sporadically communicated by the press has very little in common with a data-gathering method that is equivalent to the one used for public-opinion polls.
The larger tally is a snapshot estimate of casualties in the whole Iraqi population. It arrived as a flash in the dark, electrifying everyone. Immediately after its publication, 654,965 triggered both the dismissal chorus of the men in charge in Washington, London and Baghdad and the encouraging verdict of leading statistical experts (one of whom told ABC News: "I'll vouch for it 95%, which is as good as it gets in survey research").
By contrast, the 48,783 appears steadily but silently, making its no less tragic case more visibly each time it passes a rounded benchmark. The unfortunate element of the smaller tally is that its figures quickly pale when suddenly confronted with a figure thirteen times bigger.
The story these two numbers convey does not lie and should not be understood to lie in their respective size. Regardless of their absolute divergence and methodological approximations, each figure, when properly analysed and broken down, reveals the inhumane and intolerable story of approximately 27 million people trapped in escalating violence and revenge killings.
To get an idea of the significance of the lower figure, imagine the number of American civilians who would be dead now were they dying at the same rate. (A: 500,000 over three years.) The genocide going on in the Sudan spurred the same kind of arid dispute about the significance of numbers. For the New York Times (May 11, 2005), Marc Lacey wrote:
Is the death toll between 60,000 and 160,000, as Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick said during a recent trip to the region? Or is it closer to the roughly 400,000 dead reported last week by the Coalition for International Justice, a Washington-based nongovernmental organization that was hired by the United States Agency for International Development to try to determine whether the killing amounts to genocide?
That was what Colin Powell, the former U.S. secretary of state, called the Darfur killings last year. But Zoellick avoided the issue this month and has recently accused advocacy groups of overstating the number of dead to force Washington to adopt much tougher policies against the Sudanese.
"Civil war" is a politer term than "genocide" but both can refer to the same reality--Kosovo, and Rwanda, for example. While the occupying superpower in Iraq denies the reality of civil war, it forestalls the question: Is the occupation aggravating the genocide it has proven powerless to stop? A superpower that doesn't "do body counts" cannot endlessly deny those who do.
Meanwhile, the Bush Administration has broken with tabu and begun analogizing Iraq to Vietnam. Eric Posner (Law, Chicago) suggests other analogies: Lebanon, Somalia.
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