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All the major news sources have been and are propagating the news about US deaths in Iraq (which has hit 116 and surpassed the wartime total). The flip side of the coin, Iraqi civilian casualties, goes largely unreported as a total.
Various reasons are put forward for this (i.e. “We don't do body counts”), but it really is a simple matter of simple addition.
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The number stood at a minimum of 7,700 deaths when I wrote this, which if taken at face value, produces a phenomenal 1:70 ratio. Note that these only a compilation of incidents reported in reliable mass media and are likely to be an undercount.
At a minimum, these deaths should be mourned as much as the loss of 116 American lives. The entries in the “target” category (accessible from the full list under the numbers on the main page) expose the full spectrum of the tragedy: From suicide bomber to unknown assailant, to bystanders and wedding celebrants and Reuters cameramen. I fully doubt these civilian deaths were all committed by US troops willingly attacking civilian targets. They are casualties of an occupation policy which is proving to be ineffective and is putting US armed forces into positions where they are having to murder civilians in order to protect themselves. It is creating exactly the kind of culture clash that Al-Qiada and their ilk would have loved to foment by pitting heavily armed and nervous US military personnel in a Middle Eastern country as occupiers AND enforcers of the peace AND builders of a new order in Iraq.
The number of the dead should at least be reported as a sum so that the flip side of the coin that is being paid as part of the terrible price of the Iraqi occupation is fully revealed. People should be saying, in addition to “Our boys and girls are dying out there”, “Our boys and girls are being forced to kill innocent people out there”.
Cambridge, 29 October 2003
Copyleft notice: Copyright (C) 1999-2005 Mustafa Ünlü. This information is free; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.