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Body Counts

“How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis.”
George W. Bush, 2005-12-14.

“I don’t have a clue and I don’t plan to undertake any real effort to find out.”
~ General Colin Powell, when asked about the number of deaths the Iraqi military suffered.

Sources for Iraq war body counts. Keep in mind counts will be low for three reasons:

1. In the chaos of war, reporting casualties is a low priority.
2. Iraqis do not want casualty reports to demoralise their troops.
3. Bush does not want casualty reports to anger the anti-war movement.

• According to the Washington Post as of 2006-10-10 a team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred. It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that George W. Bush gave in a speech in 2005-12. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.
• The Iraqi ministry of Health estimates 150,000 civilians killed as of 2006-11-09.
• According to The Harring Report as of 2006-08-15, 158,000 U.S. military were shipped to Iraq, 5,500 deserted, 12,000 were killed and 25,000 seriously wounded according to DoD unpublished lists. The official total is 2,791 killed.
• As of 2005-12-07, U.S. military dead in Iraq, including suicides, 2,125; U.S. military amputeed, wounded, injured, mentally ill, all now out of Iraq, 49,500; Iraqi civilians dead, 118,900.
  ~ McLaughlin Group
• on 2005-12-12 Bush admitted 30,000 Iraqis have been killed. He made the comment at a world Affair Council Q & A session.
• Here is a ball park estimate based on the Viet Nam war. 444,000 North Vietnamese and 220,557 South Vietnamese military personnel and 587,000 civilians were killed. The Vietnam war cost $623 billion in today’s dollars.

  In the Vietnam war, the cost per civilian killed was thus $1 million. If that same spending efficiency had been achieved in Iraq, there would be 300,000 dead civilians by the time $300 billion had been spent. It is pushing 1 trillion now.

  Consider that killing people in Iraq is far easier than in Viet Nam. In Viet Nam there was impenetrable jungle cover, a huge network of tunnels, and the enemy spread out over a very wide area thinly populated. Further in Iraq much less care was taken to avoid killing civilians. There was less ground action and more aerial bombing of cities.

  Republicans claim that Americans killed only a few thousand or so Iraqis. This is thus an obvious lie. Those fibbers are trying to make you believe Uncle Sam spent 100 million dollars to kill each Iraqi civilian. That is preposterous. Arafat recruited suicide bombers for only $15 thousand each.

• The most reliable statistic of the Iraq war because it was the only one published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Lancet the medical journal states that 100,000 civilians had died as a result of the American invasion of Iraq as of 2004-10. This did not include Fallujah. This includes those who died of disease, thirst and starvation as a result of destroying hospitals, water supplies, sewage treatment plants and electric plants. The articles are not longer available on Lancet, but you can read a summary. Read the original paper.
• Bush does not count soldiers who die en route to hospital or in hospital in Germany as deaths. This means the true death count of American soldiers is over five times higher than Bush is reporting.
• The Government of Puerto Rico says that the true numbers of American deaths in Iraq are at over twice what Bush has been reporting (4,076 vs 1,649 over the first 800 days). They discovered Bush’s numbers did not tally with their own counts for Puerto Ricans killed.
• Cryptome gives graphs by month, names and cause of deaths for those officially acknowledged killed.
• icasualties.org stats by month, including deaths and woundings as reported by the DoD.
• From 2004-11-01 to 2005-03-12, there were a total of 3306 attacks in the Baghdad area. Of these, 2400 were directed against coalition forces. In other words, according to the unclassified US Army report, the Iraqi resistance were 73% of the time attacking coalition forces, not Iraqi collaborators and civilians as most US propaganda claims.
• “More than 15,000 troops with so-called 'non-battle' injuries and diseases have been evacuated from Iraq,” wrote the Department of Defense.
• There are discrepancies in the various sources indicating the actual counts of American dead and wounded may be much higher than Bush is admitting.

  “When war is declared, truth is the first casualty.”
  ~ Arthur Ponsonby

• John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org told 60 Minutes that the uncounted casualty figure “would have to be somewhere in the ballpark of over 20, maybe 30,000”.
• iraqbodycount.org
• cursor.org body counts
• Iraq-o-Meter: statistics about the Iraq war.
• Graph of daily fatalities

• “There are about 400 attacks a week of all kinds: bombings, shootings, rocket and mortar attacks. About half cause significant damage or injure or kill someone.”
  ~ General Myers

• “We don’t do body counts”
  ~ Tommy Franks, General, US Central Command

• “When boys first go to bed,
  They step into their voluntary graves,
  Sleep binds them fast; only their breath
  Makes them not dead:
  Successive nights, like rolling waves,
  Convey them quickly, who are bound for death.”
  ~ George Herbert, Mortification

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