More
Than One Million Iraqi Deaths Since US Invasion
By Patrick Martin
15 September 2007
WSWS.org
As part of its campaign to justify
a long-term US occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration has increasingly
resorted to warning of chaos and even genocide in the wake of a withdrawal
of American troops. But a new report suggests that something akin to
genocide is already taking place, under American auspices.
The British polling agency
ORB reported
Thursday that the death toll in Iraq since the 2003 US invasion has
passed the one million mark.
According to ORB,
US-occupied Iraq, with an estimated 1.2 million violent deaths, has
“a murder rate that now exceeds the Rwanda genocide from 1994
(800,000 murdered),” with another one million wounded and millions
more driven from their homes into internal or external exile.
ORB (Opinion Research Business),
which has conducted polls in Iraq since 2005, released the findings
of a survey of 1,461 adults across the country. Among other questions,
it asked: “How many members of your household, if any, have died
as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (i.e., as a result of
violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that
I mean those who were actually living under your roof.”
Of those responding, 78 percent
said their households had experienced no violent deaths, 16 percent
had experienced one death, 5 percent two deaths, 1 percent three deaths
or more. Given the number of households in the country, 4,050,597 according
to 2005 census figures, this works out to nearly 1.2 million deaths.
By far the worst death rate
was in Baghdad, where nearly half of all those interviewed reported
at least one violent death in their household. The reported death rate
in Diyala province (Baquba) was 42 percent, and in Ninewa province (Mosul),
35 percent.
The survey found that 48
percent of the violent deaths were due to gunshot wounds, 20 percent
to car bombs, 9 percent to aerial bombardment, 6 percent to other ordnance
or explosions, and 6 percent to accidents.
The figure for aerial bombardments
is particularly noteworthy since such deaths—numbering well over
100,000 according to the ORB study—go virtually unreported in
the American media. This is doubtless because such killings are entirely
the work of the US and British occupation forces, the only ones equipped
with helicopters and warplanes.
The ORB survey found a far
higher death rate than the figures released by Western media outlets,
the US-established Iraqi government in Baghdad, or the United Nations.
But it dovetails with the public health survey conducted last year by
a team of scientists from Johns Hopkins University and published in
the British medical journal Lancet, which estimated the death toll (as
of early 2006, nearly 18 months ago), at about 665,000.
The Lancet figures were denounced
by the US and Iraqi governments and dismissed by the American media,
and the ORB figures are likely to face the same fate. The study’s
findings were reported only in passing in Friday’s daily newspapers,
most prominently by the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe, not at all
by the New York Times or Washington Post.
None of the network evening
news broadcasts on Friday even mentioned the ORB report.
Opinion Research Business
is not a left-wing or antiwar group, but an established polling organization,
founded in 1994 by Gordon Heald, who headed Gallup Britain from 1980
to 1994. Its customers include the huge mining concern Anglo American,
the Bank of Scotland, and the Conservative Party. Its non-executive
director is Geoffrey Martin OBE, currently special adviser to the secretary
general on strategic relationships of the British Commonwealth.
The ORB survey was based
on face-to-face interviews conducted between August 12 and August 19
among a nationally representative sample of 1,720 adults (of whom 1,461
responded), with a standard margin of error of 2.4 percent. Random sampling
was used to select those interviewed in 15 of Iraq’s 18 provinces.
For security reasons, no
interviews were conducted in Al Anbar or Karbala provinces, or in the
province of Irbil, where Kurdish authorities refused to allow field
interviews. Since Anbar and Karbala are among the bloodiest battlefields
of the war, and Irbil among the quietest, the exclusion of the three
provinces would more likely to lead to an underestimation of the death
toll than an exaggeration.
The ORB study was made public
on the same day that President Bush went on national television to deliver
a report on conditions in Iraq that was nothing short of delusional.
With a million Iraqis dead, a million wounded, and four to five million
displaced, Bush hailed the return of “normal life” to the
devastated country. “Sectarian killings are down, and ordinary
life is beginning to return,” he said.
The next day Bush and Vice
President Cheney appeared before hand-picked audiences to press their
campaign for an unlimited US occupation of Iraq. Bush spoke at the Marine
base at Quantico, Virginia and Cheney at the Gerald Ford Museum in Michigan
and the headquarters of the Central Command in Florida.
Cheney claimed that the result
of a rapid US troop withdrawal would be “chaos” and “carnage,”
declaring, “In all the calls we’ve heard for an American
withdrawal from Iraq, these negative consequences haven’t really
been denied, they’ve simply been ignored.”
Cheney raised the specter
of Iranian intervention in a post-US Iraq, which “would unloose
an all-out war, with the violence unlikely to be contained within Iraq.
The ensuing carnage would further destabilize the Middle East and magnify
the threat to our friends throughout the region.”
Bush, speaking before an
audience of 250 Marines and their families in Quantico, claimed, “We
got security in the right direction and we are bringing our troops home.”
Also Friday, the State Department
quietly released a report noting that religious freedom has sharply
deteriorated in Iraq over the past year because of the upsurge in sectarian
killings, with minority religions (Sunnis in Shiite areas, Shiites in
Sunni areas, secular Iraqis, Christians and smaller groups in all areas)
subjected to systematic persecution.
The report cited “frequent
sectarian violence including attacks on places of worship,” as
well as “harassment, intimidation, kidnapping, and killings,”
adding that “non-Muslims (are) especially vulnerable to pressure
and violence, because of their minority status and, often, because of
the lack of a protective tribal structure.”
The Democratic Party is fully
complicit in the creation of conditions of near-genocide in Iraq, since
the congressional Democratic leadership has refused to cut off funding
for a war which has cost the lives of more than one million Iraqis,
as well as over 3,700 American soldiers.
In response to Bush’s
Thursday night speech, there were renewed professions of impotence by
leading Senate Democrats. Barack Obama, who began his campaign for the
Democratic presidential nomination touting his antiwar credentials,
said the Democratic-controlled Congress could not force Bush to accept
a deadline for ending the war.
“One way of ending
the war would be setting a timetable,” he said in a speech in
Iowa. “We’re about 15 votes short. Right now it doesn’t
look like we’re going to get that many votes.”
Obama was referring to the
67 votes required in the Senate to override a presidential veto. He
was silent on the fact that there are other constitutional methods of
ending the war, such as refusing to appropriate the funds to finance
it, which the Democratic congressional leadership has rejected.
Senator Kent Conrad of North
Dakota, chair of the Senate Budget Committee, told Congressional Quarterly,
“The truth is we don’t have the votes to end the war.”
He said Senate Democrats would seek to “move the things that we
can move on domestic issues” in order to “have tangible
accomplishments,” rather than persist in debates on Iraq.
Other senators endorsed this
view, including Charles Schumer of New York, who said, referring to
the upcoming 2008 campaign, “This election is shaping up to be
about change. Not only change in Iraq, but change at home.” Senator
Ken Salazar of Colorado said, “The Democratic message has to focus
on things that are good for the middle class. The war should not be
the only issue.”
In the House of Representatives,
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not scheduled any vote on Iraq war policy this
month, although the defense authorization bill still remains to be adopted
for the fiscal year beginning October 1. All indications are that the
congressional Democrats will rubber-stamp both the authorization and
the emergency funding bill for the war, expected to approach $200 billion,
which has not yet been sent to Congress by the Bush administration.
The silence from the Democratic
and Republican parties and the media on the latest evidence of mass
killing and social devastation in Iraq as a result of the US colonial
war and occupation underscores the complicity of the entire American
ruling elite and all of its official institutions in a war crime of
catastrophic proportions.
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