Death Toll In War On Iraq

1 Million Dead in Iraq? 6 Reasons the Media Hide the True Human Toll of War ...

As the U.S. war in Iraq winds down, we are entering a familiar phase, the season of forgetting—forgetting the harsh realities of the war. Mostly we forget the victims of the war, the Iraqi civilians whose lives and society have been devastated by eight years of armed conflict. The act of forgetting is a social and political act, abetted by the American news media. Throughout the war, but especially now, the minimal news we get from Iraq consistently devalues the death toll of Iraqi civilians.

Why?A number of reasons are at work in this escape from reality persists. But oblivion has consequences, especially with the stubborn right braces narrative of "victory" in the Iraq war. If we forget, we learn nothing.

I surprised the habit of reaching the lowest estimates possible number of Iraqis who have died unnecessarily since March 2003. The habit has become ingrained. Over a period of about two weeks in May, I met in the mainstream media news three separate references to the number of people who had died in the Iraq war. Anderson Cooper, on his CNN show, Steven Lee Myers in the  New York Times Magazine  and Brian MacQuarrie in the  Boston Globe  all pegged the number in the tens of thousands, sometimes adding “at least.” But the number that sticks is this “tens of thousands.”

Cooper, Myers and MacQuarrie—all skillful reporters—are scarcely alone. It’s very rare to hear anything approximating the likely death toll, which is well into the hundreds of thousands, possibly more than one million. It‘s a textbook case of how opinion gatekeepers reinforce each other’s caution. Because the number of civilians killed in a U.S. war is so morally fraught, the news media, academics and political leaders tend to gravitate toward the figure (if mentioned at all) that is least disturbing. 

The “tens of thousands” mantra is peculiar because even the most conservative calculation—that provided by Iraq Body Count, a British NGO—is now more than 100,000, and IBC acknowledges that their number is probably about half correct.They count as civilians killed by violence that are named in English and some new figures morgue. Their method is incomplete for a number of reasons-News media coverage is far from complete, the most obvious and many Iraqis who are killed are not labeled by authorities as civilians. The balance of non-violent deaths (women die in childbirth, for example, because the health care system was devastated by the war) is very high and is not included in calculation of BAC.

1 Million Dead in Iraq? 6 Reasons the Media Hide the True Human ...

As the U.S. war in Iraq winds down, we are entering a familiar phase, the season of forgetting—forgetting the harsh realities of the war. Mostly we forget the victims of the war, the Iraqi civilians whose lives and society have been devastated by eight years of armed conflict. The act of forgetting is a social and political act, abetted by the American news media. Throughout the war, but especially now, the minimal news we get from Iraq consistently devalues the death toll of Iraqi civilians.

Why? A number of reasons are at work in this persistent evasion of reality. But forgetting has consequences, especially as it braces the obstinate right-wing narrative of “victory” in the Iraq war. If we forget, we learn nothing.

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