Apathy and Death in Iraq

Shaan Sachev asks whether it's right for the United States to wash its hands of the controversy over counting deaths in Iraq.

By Shaan Sachdev

Editor's Note: The following editorial reflects the views of the author and are not Bard College, its faculty or students.

NEW YORK, Oct 19 -- Death tolls are generally disputed. Before technological advancements, death tolls of conflicts were rarely estimated. Rwanda’s genocide took between 800,000 to 1 million lives. The give and take of two hundred thousand lives, in this case, seems insignificant when examining the dispute of the death toll of Iraqi civilians since 2003.

The Iraqi death toll may boast a wider range than that of any conflict in the last few decades. The Iraqi government, in a recent report, estimated that 85,000 Iraqis have died between 2004 and 2008. Just Foreign Policy, a left-leaning critic of American foreign policy, estimates 1,339,771 deaths since 2003.

Most estimates fall in between this range, some more disputable than others. A study by the John Hopkins School of Health in conjunction with Iraqi doctors from al-Mustanceriya University in Baghdad estimated that the number of “excess deaths” in 2006 was more than 655,000. The Iraqi Body Count, on the other hand, rests its case at between 93,000 and 102,000 deaths.

We are told that we have unprecedented access to information and technology. The staggering universal network of media conglomerates is utilized extensively by the United States when taking stances on Bosnia or North Korea or Iran. It seems absurd that the public has been left in absolute darkness on the issue of the civilian death toll in Iraq.

The American government obviously benefits off of such ambiguity and downplay, while the far left gains ammunition from exaggerated statistics. Such a political tug-of-war is irrelevant to the importance of transparency on what has become a humanitarian crisis by any estimated death toll.

The illegitimacy of the war in Iraq was apparent only minutes after its inception—the destruction and consequences of the war must be made equally accessible. U.S. foreign policy’s negligence of the civilian death toll during wars has remained quiescent since the Vietnam War. It is time for real change.

As troops draw down in Iraq, the United States government must allow for and entirely support a comprehensive investigation of the civilian death toll, to be carried out by an independent monitoring team with international support. The investigation must exceed a mere tally of deaths—it should account for civilian and general Iraqi deaths, as well as the cause of and circumstances surrounding each incident when calculable.

Both the United States and international community have failed in demanding transparency on a death toll that some estimate surpasses Rwanda and Darfur combined. They have failed to heed to human rights principles and laws that insist that governments operate transparently.

The international investigation will put disputed death tolls and allegations of military violence to rest, and shame the United States and global community into recognizing the catastrophic consequences of the war in Iraq.