the History Guy? your brother?..158,000 Iraqi men women and children dead during and shortly after the Gulf War: War's toll: 158,000 Iraqis and a researcher's position
By Thomas Ginsberg
Inquirer Staff Writer
philly.com time, Beth Osborne Daponte will be leaving her calculator off.
A senior researcher at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, Daponte was the Census Bureau demographer who postulated in 1991 that 158,000 Iraqi men, women and children died during and shortly after the Persian Gulf war. In return, she was reprimanded by her government, and saw her report rewritten and her career sidetracked.
Today, with another war in Iraq a possibility, Daponte says she has no intention of trying to estimate Iraqi deaths again. Revealing finely tuned cynicism, she wonders whether it would be worth the stress.
"On some level, is it going to matter if it's 10,000 dead versus 80,000 dead?" Daponte said, shedding her scientific objectivity. "Hopefully, these would be deaths that effective diplomacy could avoid. The question is, have we exhausted all effective diplomatic alternatives?"
The casualty issue is rising again, almost 11 years to the day after Daponte's body count caused a national ruckus after the Pentagon said there was no way to estimate it. By her count, based on demographic projections and ground-level accounts, more Iraqi civilians than soldiers perished during and after the war.
Though many experts agree that Americans' support for war may hinge on U.S. deaths, some also ponder how many Iraqis may be killed without damaging the war's goals and its public support.
"I suspect most conservatives would not be terribly upset at a lot of Iraqi casualties," said Ted Galen Carpenter, a foreign-policy expert at the Cato Institute. "But... the administration is serious about keeping them low... . Its strategy is portrayed as a liberation of Iraq, and if there is a large number of civilian casualties it will be difficult to maintain that image."
Some independent analysts have speculated that 50,000 Iraqi civilians could die in a U.S. invasion. But others, including Daponte and Galen Carpenter, say there are far too many variables to make such a prediction. One suggests it won't matter much anyway, compared with Americans' deaths.
"As far as I can see, Americans don't care about foreign casualties," said John Mueller, an Ohio State University political scientist and expert on U.S. public opinion about war.
"When we ask people point-blank in polls, they say it does matter. But the polling evidence suggests it really doesn't in the end," said Mueller, offering an example: "How many American lives is worth one Somali life? Not one."
Such assertions touch nerves across the spectrum from peace activists to war proponents.
Peter Brooks, a military analyst at the Heritage Foundation, rejects the notion that Americans don't care about foreign deaths, saying U.S. war planners "are always trying to minimize collateral damage."
Instead, he blames Saddam Hussein for the most egregious killing of Iraqis, civilians or not.
"He gassed the Kurds, he has probably killed over 100,000 of his own people, and he has used people as human shields," Brooks said. "I think U.S. military planners do take [Iraqi casualties] into account... . And we're in a better position this time because of better precision-guided munitions."
The issue was just as sensitive in 1991. Then, the U.S. goal was not killing civilians but ejecting Hussein's army from Kuwait. Still, the Pentagon afterward avoided making any estimate of Iraqi casualties; its only official number was U.S. military deaths - 146 soldiers. Iraq has only given a number of 1.7 million killed since 1989 by sanctions and war, a number most U.S. experts doubt.
Daponte, a staff demographer at the Census Bureau, was assigned to estimate Iraq's population as part of her job of producing country-by-country population estimates.
The University of Chicago-trained sociologist says she got permission to speak to any expert and use the best data from any source. She recalls she was given a few months, rather than the usual few days. She says she expected that her findings, like all others, would be printed in an unclassified report.
Her conclusion: 86,194 men, 39,612 women, and 32,195 children died in one year as a direct and indirect result of the U.S.-led attack and the ensuing Shiite and Kurdish rebellions.
About a quarter, 40,000, were Iraqi soldiers killed in combat.
The rest were civilians, including 13,000 who got caught in the cross fire. About 70,000 civilians died after the war due mainly to the destruction of water and power plants.
"I would do the work differently now... . We'd present the numbers as a range instead of a single estimate," she said. "But I still stand by those numbers."
When a Greenpeace activist made her tally public, the Census Bureau balked. The White House and Defense Department had just said no Iraqi casualty estimate was possible. Now a lowly number-cruncher had proclaimed tens of thousands dead.
Within days, the Census Bureau notified Daponte that she was going to be fired, saying she had falsified data and skirted a peer review. Her report was rewritten to suggest fewer civilian deaths, although it eventually survived as one of the few expert casualty estimates.
Daponte challenged her dismissal and eventually refuted the charges. But she found herself without any assignments and forbidden to speak or write about Iraq.
"I had a job but no work," said Daponte, who later took a temporary leave and left the bureau in 1996.
Daponte's supervisor at the time did not return phone calls last week seeking comment.
Today, Daponte has no plans to work on Iraqi demographics again, but remains convinced she did the right thing.
"When I was told not to think or talk about Iraq, that was wrong," she said.
Besides: "Nobody has ever said the numbers were wrong." |
