According to an AP story out today, the United Nations refugee agency is saying that at least 914,000 Iraqis have fled their homes since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, and that the actual number of displaced Iraqis is "likely to be much higher." That figure is staggering to me. Think of it -- people gathering up their children, their elderly, their possessions, their lives -- a million or so people compelled to leave their homes in order to escape the violence around them. How many of us simply ignore reports like that? Why don't we pay more attention to numbers?
Last week George W. Bush dismissed as "not credible" figures from a recently released report estimating that some 600,000 Iraqi people have died as a result of the war during that same time period. For anyone who is interested, "The Human Cost of the War in Iraq; A Mortality Study 2002 - 2006" can be accessed on this MIT Center for International Studies page. Data collection methods are explained within the document, and they are essentially the same data collection methods used in surveys which are relied upon for any number of "credible" government reports, public opinion polls, etc. for a variety of information every day, i.e. by surveying a representative sample of a population in order to obtain reasonably accurate results with some percentage range of uncertainty. Bush would prefer to have us believe (despite the fact that his administration has previously stated that they don't bother to count them) that the number of Iraqis who have been killed since the United States invaded their country is in the mere tens -- not hundreds -- of thousands. There's really no way to know for sure.
And what about Americans soldiers killed in Iraq? Every day someone will report to us that the number has reached X amount -- this week it is closing in on 2,800. I'm ashamed to admit that it never once occurred to me until today, when I googled "Iraq dead" and looked at several of the sites that came up in the results, that the ones who were injured in Iraq but didn't immediately die -- those who died while being flown to military hospitals outside Iraq, or who died in those hospitals, those whose numbers are likely in the thousands -- those dead servicemen and women are not included in the number of war dead provided by our government. Whether they live or die, once our injured soldiers leave Iraq their numbers become virtually invisible to the American public. Killed in Iraq means just that -- killed in Iraq.
Lately it seems that some Americans are waking from a deep sleep -- that the number of "us" killed on the other side of the world is finally becoming unacceptably large to them, as though there exists some suddenly uncomfortable number of dead Americans (as opposed to dead Iraqis?) that has made this effort less than cost-effective in their minds. Sadly, as painful as it is to the American people (in no way do I mean to minimize the sacrifice of those in military service) not quite 2,800 is a conveniently low number, politically speaking, for Bush and pals to be obligated to produce. We'll never really know how many Americans, Iraqis, or others have died as a result of our government's decision to wage this war. For now, it's probably safe to say that most of the numbers they toss about are not entirely credible.
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