Iraq’s Health Ministry has ordered a halt to a count of civilians killed during the war and told its statistics department not to release figures compiled so far, the official who oversaw the count told The Associated Press on .
The order was relayed by the ministry’s director of planning, Dr. Nazar Shabandar, but the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which oversees the ministry, also wanted the counting to stop, said Dr. Nagham Mohsen, the head of the ministry’s statistics department.
“We have stopped the collection of this information because our minister didn’t agree with it,” she said, adding: “The CPA doesn’t want this to be done.”…
The U.S. and British militaries don’t count civilian casualties from their wars, saying only that they try to minimize civilian deaths.
Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people → civilian casualties, urban bombardment, etc. → aversion to keeping track of civilian casualties
Here’s another well-researched report from the Project on Defense Alternatives: Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Idea of a “New Warfare”. It’s about the “casualty agnosticism” in which the military and politicians make grand claims about how precision warfare limits civilian casualties, while at the same time claiming that there’s no way to really know how many civilians are actually killed or maimed, so there’s no reason to bother counting or estimating the number.
Zeynep Toufe of Under the Same Sun remarks on the 1,000th fatality of a U.S. soldier in the Iraq war:
Meanwhile, Iraq Body Count has the number of Iraqi civilians ‘reported killed by military intervention in Iraq’ as somewhere between 11,790 and 13,082. Note that just the margin of error on [the] number of Iraqi civilians killed by the military intervention is more than twice the number of American soldiers killed. That’s how concerned, how precise we are with their dead…
Also, this is our soldiers against their civilians, not exactly an equal count. Who knows how many soldiers or insurgents were killed on their side? Is anyone counting? Just today Rumsfeld was talking about having killed a few thousand in the last month alone:
Rumsfeld: … in the last month the Iraqi forces and the coalition forces have probably killed 1,500, 2,000, 2,500 former regime elements, criminals, terrorists. Now is that a lot? Yes. Does that hurt them? Yes. Is it a lot out of 25 million people in a country? No.
Can you imagine anyone making the same point about us? Can you imagine how we’d react to someone who said, well, the United States, they are almost 300 million there so what’s 30,000 to them? (Scalewise, that’s how Rumsfeld’s definition of “not a lot” translates into the U.S. population numbers.) Also, use that number as a guide for the scale of the insurgency: the number of people who died fighting us just last month would scale into 30,000 American lives if the situations were reversed. That’s more than half the number of American soldiers who died in Vietnam. That’s the kind of damage we’re inflicting and they’re still fighting. That number alone should tell you something about the nature of this sordid war.
