What is the real death toll in Iraq?

[laststeamtrain]

What is the real death toll in Iraq?

The Americans learned one lesson from Vietnam: don't count the civilian dead. As a result, no one knows how many Iraqis have been killed in the five years since the invasion. Estimates put the toll at between 100,000 and one million, and now a bitter war of numbers is raging. Jonathan Steele and Suzanne Goldenberg report

Lieutenant General Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan during his time as head of US Central Command, once announced, "We don't do body counts." This blunt response to a question about civilian casualties was an attempt to distance George Bush's wars from the disaster of Vietnam. One of the rituals of that earlier conflict was the daily announcement of how many Vietnamese fighters US forces had killed. It was supposed to convince a sceptical American public that victory was coming. But the "body count" concept sounded callous - and never more so than when it emerged that many of the alleged guerrilla dead were in fact women, children and other unarmed civilians.

Iraq was going to be different. The US would count its own dead (now close to 4,000), but the toll the war was taking on Iraqis was not a matter the Pentagon or any other US government department intended to quantify. Especially once Bush had declared "mission accomplished" on May 1 2003 - after that, every new Iraqi who died by violence would be a signal that the president was wrong, and would show that a war conducted in the name of humanitarian intervention was exacting a mounting humanitarian toll of its own...http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/19/iraq

[babylonsister]

1. Here's a link to that all-important Lancet Report:

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/06/061031_lancet_co_author.php

[malaise]

2. Good article

Thanks
K & R

[spanone]

3. we are a mighty arrogant nation....we may never know the truth

[1620rock]

4. Yes, and Vietnam war fighting and death was on teevee in each and every

American home in full living color right about supper-time each and every night.
These are some of the things that helped to end that debacle of a war.
No more of that kind of truthful free press and media. Oh indeed the new war mongers have learned the Vietnam lesson well.