Do Iraqi Civilian Casualties Matter?

By Les Roberts, AlterNet. Posted February 8, 2006.

[Editor's Note: This essay is part of a series of Audits of the Conventional Wisdom, a project of the Center for International Studies at MIT.]

A disturbing thing happened to me in Afghanistan last May while working on a project to install wells in villages. After a delightful month of working in a rural province, filled with welcoming leaders and offers of tea at every house, the mood suddenly changed. A young man walked up to my 42-year-old female American colleague and bashed her in the face. As we collected our interviewers and headed back to the vehicles, children from the village pelted us with stones. This violence against anything foreign played out in hundreds of locations across Afghanistan that day. The sudden burst of hatred for all things seen as related to the occupying Americans was primarily the combination of two things: plans for the Afghan Government to grant the United States a long-term lease on an airbase, and the simultaneous accusation in Newsweek magazine the day before that in Guantanamo Bay, U.S. military personnel had defiled the Koran.

A more disturbing thing happened that same month. Accusations by Amnesty International that a pattern of abuse has been documented in Guantanamo Bay were brusquely dismissed by President Bush. This was the most recent highlight in what I believe to be the greatest threat to U.S. national security: the image that the United States is a violator of international laws and order and that there is no means other than violence to curb it.

This impression that the United States is beyond the law arises from several factors: indifference or hostility to international environmental treaties and the International Criminal Court; invading Iraq under unsupportable, and probably illegal, pretenses; and repeated opinions expressed by high officials in Washington that the Geneva Conventions should not constrain our activities in Iraq or in our prisons. This last point seems particularly problematic, since the 1949 articles of the Geneva Conventions were ratified by the United States more than 50 years ago. These laws imply that abusing prisoners to gain information is illegal -- as has happened in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere -- a topic getting widespread and deserved publicity. But another troubling aspect of war policy not receiving attention commensurate with its significance is the large number of civilian casualties in Iraq.

The Scale of Civilian Casualties

The deaths of civilians in Iraq may indeed add up to violations of the Geneva Conventions, especially Article IV. This became apparent to me last year, when I headed a multinational team of medical and public health researchers to investigate the scale of fatalities associated with the U.S. invasion of Iraq and subsequent violence.

The resulting report, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, estimated around 100,000 and possibly far more civilians have died because of the invasion. Our study was based on 988 household interviews in 33 randomly picked neighborhoods from across the entire country, and covered the period between on the beginning of the war (March 2003) and September 2004.

Most disturbing and certain about the results, is that over 80 percent of violent deaths were caused by U.S. forces and that most of the people they killed were women and children. None of the deaths we recorded involved intentional wrongdoing on the part of individual soldiers, instead being mostly from artillery and aerial weaponry. When I presented these results to about thirty Pentagon employees last fall, one came up to me afterwards and said, "We have dropped about 50,000 bombs, mostly on insurgents hiding behind civilians. What the [expletive] did you think was going to happen?" Our survey team's 100,000 death estimate for the first 18 months after the U.S. led-invasion equates to about 101 coalition-attributed violent deaths per day.

Les Roberts is an epidemiologist who has worked in the past for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and the International Rescue Committee. He is a lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University.