October 28, 2004

Study Claims 100,000 Iraqi Civilian Deaths

President Bush has the blood of 100,000 Iraqi civilians on his hands. Expect that to be the spin from Bush bashers and Kerry Edwards. I wonder a little about extrapolating from interviews. I also wonder why this study differs by a large magnitude from this anti-war bodycount.

This isn't knee-jerk pro-war spin but I wonder about this claim from Johns Hopkins University researchers on civilian deaths in Iraq:

Most of the casualties occurred after the end of major hostilities in May 2003, researchers said in the study. Observations suggest that civilian deaths since the war are mostly caused by air strikes, the survey said. Two-thirds of the deaths were in the insurgent-held Sunni Muslim Iraqi city of Fallujah, the study said.

This analysis doesn't so much support the anti-war claim that the U.S. invasion was wrong. Instead, it demonstrates what happens when the U.S. is too soft on insurgents. If the Marines cleaned out the city earlier this year instead of hoping the Fallujah Brigade would bring order, then many lives would have been saved. By not going in hard into Fallujah, it only empowered the insurgents who thought they discovered America's achilles' heal.

"100,000 Civilians Died Because of Iraq War, Hopkins Study Says" [via Political Wire]