The Body Count

Aug. 2, 2006

“Iraqi Death Toll Rises Above 100 Per Day, U.N. Says” -- July 18 headline in the New York Times

That headline was repeated in newspapers around the country recently. No doubt it barely raised a yawn from most Americans, for whom the war is just a rumor. The war is just heat lightning far beyond the horizon -- you can’t even hear the thunder, it’s half a world away.
The big story in America in mid-July was the dither over what gab-grenade Star Jones is going to do with her bad self now that she’s been kicked off “The View.”
But what if an equivalent number of Americans were being killed each day as happens in Iraq? Would we pay attention? Iraq is after all, our mess. Shouldn’t we care just a wee bit more?
There are roughly 26 million Iraqis compared to close to 296 million Americans. So let’s say that we have a bit more than 10 times as many people here compared to Iraq.
So, if 100 people die each day on the average in Iraq, an equivalent number would be about 1,000 Americans.
Would it get our attention if 1,000 Americans were dying each day at the hands of religious death squads and car bombs?
Suppose we had a 9/11-level death toll every three days in our country as is presently the equivalent in Iraq?
Would we care?
According to the United Nations, 14,338 Iraqis died as the result of violence in the first six months of this year. Imagine if the equivalent number of 143,380 Americans had died in that period.
Would we care?
According to researchers at www.iraqbodycount.net, between 39,284-to-43,744 Iraqis have been killed as the result of military activity alone since 2003.
If we apply the rule of 10 and translate those deaths here, that would mean the loss of somewhere between 392,840 and 437,440 Americans.
And as we know, people in Iraq don’t die from bombs and hooded killers alone. They die from bad water and lack of medical care: the byproducts of our bombing their water and sewage treatment plants and electrical power stations. Babies can die as easily from dysentery, hepatitis and other water-borne diseases as easily as they can from bombs.
In 2004, researchers from Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland published an article claiming that the consequences of the war had cost Iraq 100,000 lives.
Let’s apply the rule of 10 again and assume that 1,000,000 Americans had died because some foreign ruler screwed up and thought we had hidden some weapons of mass destruction.
Would we care?
The American Civil War was our country’s greatest tragedy with 600,000 of us dying in a five-year struggle. Yet at the current rate of deaths in Iraq, that country will suffer more equivalent deaths over a five-year period in terms of the impact on its population. Yet the current wisdom in America is that there is no civil war in Iraq.
I agree. There is no civil war: just 100 dead babies, mamas, papas, sisters and brothers lying bloody in the streets of Baghdad each day, courtesy of our country’s bright idea.