Lead: "The U.S. war in Iraq enters its fifth year today. That, and 3,197 U.S. military deaths reported by the Pentagon as of 10 a.m. Friday, are among the few numerical certainties in a conflict characterized from the start by confusion and misuse of key data." The administration has also reported on the numbers of U.S. soldiers who have been wounded. It is harder in the United States to find estimates of the total numbers of casualties from the coalition forces. It seems very difficult to find numbers for the foreigner casualties from the imported workforce who are employed under the billions of dollars of funds involved in supporting the military and reconstruction efforts.
I want to quote more extensively from the article:
Two categories of data -- insurgent and civilian Iraqi deaths, and the training and deployment of Iraqi security forces -- illustrate how flexible the numbers can be.Comment: Having detailed information on deaths of one group of people, and no firm information on the much larger number of deaths in the same conflict of another group of people has grave consequences. Decisions are too often made on available information rather than accurate data. Moreover, the information that is "available" depends on how hard you look. Popular opposition to the war in Iraq in the United States would I believe be much stronger if the average citizen had a good idea of the massive suffering of the Iraqi people. JAD
"We don't do body counts on other people," Rumsfeld said during the war's ninth month, a tacit reference to the statistical excesses of Vietnam. Yet that rule has been bent repeatedly, with scant explanation of how figures are compiled.
On April 6, 2003, the Pentagon listed 61 U.S. soldiers and Marines killed or missing in action, while officers in the midst of battle estimated that "2,000 to 3,000" Iraqi combatants had been killed during a single tank incursion into central Baghdad. A year and a half later, as the U.S. death toll topped 1,000, Rumsfeld observed that in August 2004 alone, U.S. and coalition forces "probably" killed between 1,500 and 2,500 terrorists and criminals. In January 2005, Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then the top U.S. military officer in Iraq, estimated that U.S. and Iraqi forces had killed or captured 15,000 enemy fighters in 2004 -- three times as many as an estimate by Gen. John P. Abizaid, then-Centcom commander, of the total size of the insurgency about one year earlier.....
Civilian casualties have proved even harder to pin down. Before the war, the United Nations predicted that they could reach 500,000; once it started, critics claimed thousands of civilian deaths. But in his May 1, 2003, "Mission Accomplished" speech, Bush said the use of precision weapons had largely diminished noncombatant deaths.
On Dec. 12, 2005, Bush offered his first and only number of Iraqi casualties: "30,000, more or less," without distinguishing between enemies and noncombatants. The independent, London-based Iraq Body Count offered a similar figure for civilians only -- 34,516 to 38,661 Iraqis dead by early 2006.
The group's most recent tally, drawn from global media accounts, estimated civilian deaths between 59,287 and 65,121, as of yesterday. The British medical journal Lancet estimated 100,000 civilian casualties in the 18 months after the invasion, and in October it raised its total to 600,000. On the low end, the independent, U.S.-based Iraq Coalition Casualty Count placed the one-year total from March 2006 to last weekend, including Iraqi security forces, at 21,186.
The United Nations, using reports from Iraqi morgues, hospitals and local authorities, placed the 2006 figure at 34,000 -- three times the official Iraqi government count. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office ordered the country's health ministry to stop providing figures to the United Nations.
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