I didn’t hear much about the Johns Hopkins study of civilian deaths in Iraq before hearing people jeering at its conclusions as gross exaggerations and — in the tiny mind of our president — an incitement to further violence in the nation he has destroyed (sadly, with our help). Like most politicians, Bush likes some statistics and detests others, and nowadays the sound of a mere $250 billion federal budget deficit is so much sweeter than that of 655,000 dead Iraqi non-combatants. A grim tally indeed. 
One of the study’s authors, Les Roberts (recent candidate for the democratic nomination for congress in my hometown district), seems to me not at all the hysterical exaggerator type. A physician and epidemiologist, he has been working on public health issues for many years, including time in war zones like Bosnia. This study is a follow-up on the one his team released a couple of years ago that put the number of “excess deaths” (i.e. those resulting from the U.S. invasion) at that time conservatively at 100,000. (The administration hated that number too, as I recall. )
Of course, this is a statistic that was born to be an orphan, and I have little doubt that while it is excoriated by the Republicans, the Democrats will treat it like a leper, just as my hometown newspaper had done so far (no story as of yet). Bush’s reaction is understandable. Hey, what the hell — practically the only “good” news coming out of Iraq for Bush is the Saddam Hussein trial, so when someone claims that Dubya has killed more Iraqis than Saddam, this is not at all a good thing. And as the Democratic leadership knows, he’s not the only one on the hook. There’s enough blood here to stain us all, and that always makes politicians uncomfortable. Don’t want to be giving people the impression that they are, well, responsible for anything their democratically elected leaders do, now do we? That’s no way to get votes. Just give the people happy talk about how we’re the greatest country in the world, and how we’ve never done anything wrong to anybody… and by the way, there’s that evil menace out there. Oh yeah… and you can have war and tax cuts at the same time.
Whatever the pols would have you believe, if this new Iraq casualties study is anything close to true, this is truly one of the major bloodlettings of our time — Rwanda league, for sure. But even if it were closer to the lower figures I hear the administration bandying about — a mere 50,000 or 100,000 — isn’t that bad enough? Isn’t the real crime that those deaths are so unimportant, regardless of their magnitude? For chrissake, does anybody still think that this war was unavoidable? If we’re close to unanimity on that, isn’t it time we consider the degree to which we are responsible for the suffering in Iraq? Is it somehow less disturbing to imagine a 2:1 ratio of Saddam’s killings to our own than something closer to 1:1, when we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of bodies in either case? Shouldn’t totals like this bother us at least as much as some lame-ass Congressman pulling a boner on teen pages?
Democracy = responsibility. That’s why we need to speak up, act up, and vote to end this stupid war.
luv u,
jp
