Iraq was better off under Saddam (665,000 violent deaths in Iraq since we kicked him out)

There are now far more executions and torture going on there than when Saddam Hussein was in power. He was a better leader of Iraq than George Bush. Read on.

1. Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000 -- by David Brown (from The Washington Post Company)

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq's government.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq's mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated "excess deaths," 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country.

The survey was done by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. The findings are being published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet.

The same group in 2004 published an estimate of roughly 100,000 deaths in the first 18 months after the invasion. That figure was much higher than expected, and was controversial. The new study estimates that about 500,000 more Iraqis, both civilian and military, have died since then -- a finding likely to be equally controversial.

Both this and the earlier study are the only ones to estimate mortality in Iraq using scientific methods. The technique, called "cluster sampling," is used to estimate mortality in famines and after natural disasters.

While acknowledging that the estimate is large, the researchers believe it is sound for numerous reasons. The recent survey got the same estimate for immediate post-invasion deaths as the early survey, which gives the researchers confidence in the methods. The great majority of deaths were also substantiated by death certificates.

"We're very confident with the results," said Gilbert Burnham, a Johns Hopkins physician and epidemiologist.

A Defense Department spokesman did not comment directly on the estimate.

"The Department of Defense always regrets the loss of any innocent life in Iraq or anywhere else," said Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros. "The coalition takes enormous precautions to prevent civilian deaths and injuries."

He added that "it would be difficult for the U.S. to precisely determine the number of civilian deaths in Iraq as a result of insurgent activity. The Iraqi Ministry of Health would be in a better position, with all of its records, to provide more accurate information on deaths in Iraq."

Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years, called the survey method "tried and true," and added that "this is the best estimate of mortality we have."

This viewed was echoed by Sarah Leah Whitson, an official of Human Rights Watch in New York, who said, "We have no reason to question the findings or the accuracy" of the survey.

"I expect that people will be surprised by these figures," she said. "I think it is very important that, rather than questioning them, people realize there is very, very little reliable data coming out of Iraq."

The survey was conducted between May 20 and July 10 by eight Iraqi physicians organized through Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. They visited 1,849 randomly selected households that had an average of seven members each. One person in each household was asked about deaths in the 14 months before the invasion and in the period after.

The interviewers asked for death certificates 87 percent of the time; when they did, more than 90 percent of households produced certificates.

According to the survey results, Iraq's mortality rate in the year before the invasion was 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people; in the post-invasion period it was 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The difference between these rates was used to calculate "excess deaths."

Of the 629 deaths reported, 87 percent occurred after the invasion. A little more than 75 percent of the dead were men, with a greater male preponderance after the invasion. For violent post-invasion deaths, the male-to-female ratio was 10-to-1, with most victims between 15 and 44 years old.

Gunshot wounds caused 56 percent of violent deaths, with car bombs and other explosions causing 14 percent, according to the survey results. Of the violent deaths that occurred after the invasion, 31 percent were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes, the respondents said.

Burnham said that the estimate of Iraq's pre-invasion death rate -- 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people -- found in both of the Hopkins surveys was roughly the same estimate used by the CIA and the U.S. Census Bureau. He said he believes that attests to the accuracy of his team's results.

He thinks further evidence of the survey's robustness is that the steepness of the upward trend it found in excess deaths in the last two years is roughly the same tendency found by other groups -- even though the actual numbers differ greatly.

An independent group of researchers and biostatisticians based in England produces the Iraq Body Count. It estimates that there have been 44,000 to 49,000 civilian deaths since the invasion. An Iraqi nongovernmental organization estimated 128,000 deaths between the invasion and July 2005.

The survey cost about $50,000 and was paid for by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies.


2. Of pride and protection rackets -- by lenin (from leninology.blogspot.com)

IRAQ IS IN THE GRIP of an epidemic of chaos and violence. Last week suicide bombings reached a record high. The Iraqi Government’s panicked response was the declaration of a total three-day curfew across Baghdad last weekend. It is doubtful that this will make much difference.

Official figures report that 6,600 Iraqis suffered violent deaths in July and August, a 13 per cent increase on the previous two months. It is the bitterest of ironies that in the aftermath of an invasion, justified in the name of liberation, the chief expert on torture for the United Nations, Manfred Nowak, describes the current situation as “out of control”, saying that the use of torture by the security forces, militias and the insurgency may be “worse than in the times of Saddam Hussein”.

How did it get this bad?

How indeed? Historian Toby Dodge, critical of the imperialist venture in Iraq, says you can criticize Bush for hubris - that is, for overbearing pride and arrogance - but "three crucial factors explain the bloody situation in Iraq today and point to a possible solution." The first crux:

The three weeks of looting that flared up after American troops reached Baghdad caused the Iraqi State to collapse ... The institutions of the Iraqi State simply do not exist. Ordinary Iraqis try to live as best they can with little or no help from government.

Next:

The second problem that has contributed to the extreme instability is the speed with which the United States has sought to divest itself of its postwar responsibilities. In little more than a year it tried and failed to rebuild the Iraqi State and on June 28, 2004, it turned responsibility over to a small group of handpicked politicians.

Finally:

This new ruling elite has created the third problem hindering Iraq’s reconstruction ... In spite of two elections since the war, government in Iraq is still dominated by corruption, incoherence and a series of petty but disruptive disputes. This new elite has proved singularly unable to rebuild the State, impose order across the country or help the vast majority of Iraqis whose lives continue in misery.


3. When Evil Doing Comes Like Falling Rain -- by Kathy Kelly

"The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out 'stop!'

"When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer."
--Bertolt Brecht

Last summer, crimes piled up in Iraq. 3,590 people were killed in July '06; 3009 in August.

In Baghdad alone, the Coroner's Office reported 1,600 bodies arrived at the morgue in June and more than 1,800 bodies in July. 90% of the killings were executions.

It seems impossible to count how many people were tortured in Iraq over the past several months. The chief expert on torture for the United Nations, Manfred Nowak, says bluntly that the current situation is "out of control." The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) released a report in September which said that bodies sent to the capital's morgue "habitually bore signs of severe torture, including acid-induced injuries, burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin, broken bones, backs, hands and legs, missing eyes and teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails." The Iraqi authorities confirmed that most of the bodies that were found in the past six months bore serious signs of torture.

Not surprisingly, in the past seven months, a quarter of a million Iraqis are now displaced people after having fled the violence. UN reports estimate that one out of every four Iraqi children suffers from acute malnourishment. The colloquial word for this condition is "wasting."

Why are so many Iraqi children hungry and ill? One major cause of illness is impure water. Although an estimated $30 billion to $45 billion of Iraqi and American financing has gone toward reconstruction efforts in Iraq, only about 55% of the planned water projects have been completed.

Health care delivery has also suffered under U.S. supervised reconstruction efforts. At a September 28th, 2006 congressional hearing, Mr. Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for the Reconstruction in Iraq, reported that the construction of over 150 primary health care centers across Iraq has consumed $180 million dollars but has resulted in the completion of only six centers.

Bowen further noted that Iraq has lost $16 billion in oil sales--and not just because of insurgent attacks. He pointed to situations in which contractors botched the job of repairing the country's oil production infrastructure.

Mr. Bowen's earlier report, issued in 2004, also gave scathing reviews of bungled reconstruction efforts marred by corruption and incompetence.

Now Mr. Bowen can begin to wrap up his investigations. The monitoring project has been terminated and is expected to be phased out by October 2007.

This isn't to say the Bush administration and the Pentagon won't welcome certain reports about projects undertaken by U.S. military contractors and the U.S. military in Iraq. Over the next two years, a D.C. based firm called the Lincoln Group will be paid 6.2 million dollars to develop positive talking points for the U.S. military. This firm was the subject of considerable controversy last year when it was part of a Pentagon project that paid Iraqi newspapers to publish positive articles about the U.S. Coalition.

How will the Lincoln Group find a positive spin for the recent poll which found that 78 percent of Iraqis believe the American military presence causes more conflict than it prevents? 71 percent said American soldiers should be withdrawn within a year. 92 percent of Sunnis and 62 percent of Shiites support attacks on U.S. soldiers.

In September, former Secretary of State James Baker III assured the U.S. government, after spending four days in Iraq's fortified Green Zone, that he and the Iraq Study Group he chairs won't spend any time "wringing their hands in memory of past mistakes that may or may not have been committed."

Brecht's lines in the poem "When evil doing comes like falling rain" would be a fitting backdrop for Mr. Baker's approach to Iraq. Blanket the past in silence. Disparage sorrow over the torture, bloodshed, starvation and ruin as useless "hand wringing." Count on new reports of death and torture in Iraq to become so routine that they're barely reported. Use the leverage of U.S. threat, force and economic manipulation to carve Iraq into three autonomous regions, modifying a once sovereign country into more easily controlled client states. And if anyone does dare to call out "stop," what better alternative can they suggest to reverse the mayhem and chaos? Remember, we won't wring our hands over memory of what caused this havoc.

Participants in the nationwide "Declaration of Peace" campaign likewise don't believe in "wringing our hands" over past mistakes, but we believe it's essential to tell the truth about this cruel, illegal and immoral war. From a perspective of remorse for suffering caused and a desire never again to value convenient control of other people's resources over respect for human rights and human decency, this campaign aims to go forward with a commitment to nonviolently end the U.S. war in Iraq. Elected representatives in the Congress and Senate will be pressured consistently to call for closure of U.S. military bases, withdrawal of U.S. troops and support for an Iraqi- led peace process, including a peace conference to shape a post- occupation transition and an international peacekeeping presence if mandated by this peace process. The Declaration of Peace also calls for return of Iraqi control over Iraq's oil resources and for reparation payments to address the destruction caused by the U.S. war and thirteen years of economic sanctions.

When evil doing comes like falling rain, of course we must call out "Stop!" How could we not do so? But we must also say, "We're sorry. We're so very sorry." Following those crucial words, it might be possible to extend our hands, emptied of weapons, and try to make amends.

(Kathy Kelly is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence)