Someone else did the math

While the US government fixates on the more than 770 American troops killed so far in Iraq it looks like someone else is finally starting to do the math and think about the civilian death toll in Iraq. So far websites like Iraq Body Count have been the lone keepers of the grim toll that the US government simply refuses to pay any attention to or even bother to measure. As one US military official once said "We don't do civilian body counts".

However morgues in Iraq do and after figures for violent (non-accidental) civilian deaths in Baghdad were publicized Associated Press released a story about just how dangerous the figures show Iraq still is. With an average of 357 violent deaths per month it translates to an average of 76 deaths per 100,000 per year. That's 10 times the figure for New York, and almost thirty times that of Jordan, Iraq's neighbour. The figures do not include the hundreds of civilian deaths from major explosions where the dead do not go to the city morgue, and they are for Baghdad, supposedly one of the safer cities.

The Associated Press article contrasts current figures with those before when there were no illegal weapons, strict police control and very little violent crime by civilians against civilians (as opposed to by the state). Baghdad's violent death rate was around 2.9 deaths per 100,000 per year, or 4% of what it is now. So what we are seeing are civilians being gunned down by each other and the occupying forces at a rate of 25 times higher than before the invasion. Its no wonder that Iraqi civilians are fearing for their lives and feeling like the occupation is a disaster for their society.

Unfortunately there is no record of how many of those deaths are as a result of occupying forces, the article cites Amnesty International's figure that by March this year more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed "as a direct result of military intervention in Iraq, either during the war or during the subsequent occupation." which included deaths of 3,240 civilians in the one month period from March 20 to April 20, 2003 alone.

However it is clear that even if troops left today, the violence on the streets of Iraq would not simply go away. As I've pointed out many times before, even if levels of violence under occupation end up being brought down to US standard levels (which seems unlikely), they will remain many times what they were before the US invasion simply because the US "enjoys" levels of personal crime many times what other countries such as the United Kingdom, Spain and Japan enjoy.

Whatever happens, its the people of Iraq that pay the price. The dramatic change in availability of guns and escalation of personal violence since the invasion will clearly have a long lasting and damaging effect on the Iraqi society that will take many years to heal. For a country still baring the demographic scars of eight years slaughter during the Iran-Iraq war its a high price to pay. I only hope that one day they consider it was all worth while and not just another botched US intervention that will go down in the annuls of infamy.