150 Thousand Now, Eh?

Articles

150 Thousand Now, Eh?

By Jack Lepiarz
Nov. 10, 2006

Getting away from the nonstop election news for about two minutes (apparently, CNN is already breaking out the "America Decides 2008" banner), Iraq's health minister just released a report that says that 150,000 Iraqis have been killed by insurgents since the U.S. invaded.

If you haven't been keeping track of the possible death tolls in Iraq, that brings the possible death toll to one of three choices: Thirty thousand, 150 thousand, or the big kahuna of 650,000. Well, it's nice to know that we can get accurate numbers on this kind of thing.

Apparently, this number came about by averaging that roughly 100 Iraqis were brought to morgues each day. The number includes everything from police, civilians, and abductees whose bodies were later recovered. In Baghdad alone, one morgue reported receiving roughly 45-60 death victims per day.

But let's put this into perspective: George W. Bush says that only thirty to fifty thousand Iraqis have died since Saddam Hussein was deposed. A study by British medical journal The Lancet puts the number at 655,000, and now Ali al-Shemari, the Iraqi Health Minister puts the number at roughly 150,000. Since the British study came out, there's been a lot of debate as to who's right: George Bush or The Lancet. Have 30,000 Iraqis been killed or have 655,000 been killed? How many were killed by U.S. troops? And in some cases, "Who cares?" The differences have been relatively predictable. Republicans, conservatives, and supporters of George Bush generally agreed with him, whereas his opponents generally agreed with the Lancet study. Big surprise.

As stated earlier, one Baghdad morgue reported receiving about 45 (a conservative estimate) deaths per day, so the health minister's estimate of 100 deaths per day is certainly not impossible. This new estimate of 150,000 deaths seems much more realistic than 30,000 or 655,000. Even al-Shemari said that the Lancet study wasn't probable. "Since three and a half years, since the change of the Saddam regime, some people say we have 600,000 are killed," he said, "This is an exaggerated number. I think 150 is OK."

Of course, one should note that Iraqi officials had put the death toll at 40,000 less than a month ago, so this study does little else than raise further questions about the vague numbers that have been reported from so many different sources. There's George W. Bush saying 30,000, then you have U.S. generals putting the number at 50,000, the Iraqi officials changing their estimate from 40,000 to 150,000, and then finally, the British study putting the death toll at a whopping 655,000. So really, we don't have any credible answers yet, only more questions.

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About the author: Jack Lepiarz is an 18-year-old college student at Emerson College in Boston. He also co-hosts the Katherine and Jack Show on UthTV.com and has been performing various circus talents for the past several years. Though often described as stubborn and egotistical, he tries to keep an open mind and treat others the way he would like to be treated.

Email: Jackwuzhere42@aol.com

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