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To: LTK007 who wrote (6859)	3/15/2003 11:13:06 AM
From: LTK007	Respond to of 11447

<<How Many Should Die? by Bruce Schimmel Is this a just war? Let's do the numbers. Because any determination as to whether invading Iraq is justifiable must take into account how many innocent people will die. The rewards of war must be weighed against the cost of human suffering. Even many who support an invasion agree. According to a recent NY Times/CBS News poll, the current 66 percent of Americans who support an American invasion would fall some 20 points, down to 46 percent, "if a substantial number of Iraqis died." Since casualties on the American side are expected to be in the hundreds, at worst, the real question is how many Iraqis should be sacrificed to liberate their country from a tyrant. A tyrant, and a potential terrorist who might eventually touch the lives of American people. To be sure, the Bush administration is vowing to do everything possible to minimize "collateral damage." But with 3 million civilians packed into the city of Baghdad, the American military has a daunting task. U.S. officials admit that Saddam is deliberately placing military equipment next to mosques, schools and food warehouses, making civilians inseparable from the military. So, tellingly, no one in the administration is willing to say how many lives are expected to be lost. In fact, even now we don't know how many people died from the 1991 Gulf War. The government currently estimates that 3,500 Iraqi civilians and approximately 100,000 (give or take 50,000) Iraqi soldiers were killed during the 1991 war, which lasted about 100 hours. But that death toll does not take into account the aftermath -- the starvation and disease that ensued. One Commerce Department report (authored by Beth Osborne Daponte and later suppressed by the government) claims the 1991 war took the lives of some 158,000 Iraqis, 83,000 of whom were civilians, including 32,000 children. As to the currently contemplated war: Though the Bush administration will not release mortality estimates, some administration insiders say that tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens could die after an invasion. As Elinor Turner wrote in City Paper's Feb. 27 cover story, "The Real Costs of War," the prominent humanitarian physicians' group Medact has estimated that Iraqi deaths from the war could eventually reach half a million. The U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in a Jan. 7 draft report, estimates that 1.26 million Iraqi children under the age of 5 would be at risk of death from malnutrition. So, how many innocents will it take to turn our just war into a genocide? You be the judge>>