Actually the Lancet article is a bit misleading. They extrapolated using a small sample size, and if I remember correctly, the article asserts that there was a 95% chance of there being between 8,000 and approx 120,000 civilian dead in Iraq.
iraqbodycount.net estimates between 14,000 and 16,405 as of today. Even if their estimate is high, they at least try to attribute the deaths to various reports.
The US government refuses to even count, as that would open them up to criticism if not worse. I lean towards using a number between 8 and 15,000 and arbitrarily picked 12,000.
12,000 = three 9/11 attacks or 71 Oklahoma City bombings.
Not that it really makes sense to do so, but extrapolating the deaths by population, you'd arrive at an equivalent of approx 150,000 dead Americans. That's like wiping out Chattanooga, TN, completely from the face of the earth. That's 892 Oklahoma City bombings.
3,000? 10,000? 50,000? Any of these numbers are huge numbers of civilian deaths. US foreign policy made these deaths possible.
The alternative? Inspections. Before Bush kicked the UN / IAEA out of Iraq there was indeed a casualty: 1 death, a car crash killed an UNMOVIC inspector.
Inspections and no civil war and no insurgency and no rallying cry for terrorists on one hand, and "we make no mistakes and I'd do it all again" foreign policy / military doctrine on the other.
Which is better? |
