One Million Dead Iraqis

By Eric on January 30, 2008

There are plenty of ways to measure the Iraq War. You could measure it in days, months, and years. You could measure it in dollars spent, or dollars taken away from domestic programs, like education and healthcare. You could measure it in the number of American soldiers whose lives have been lost.

You could also measure it in the number of Iraqis who have been killed. And if you measured the Iraq War in this way, you would arrive at the figure of one million dead Iraqis.

A fifth of Iraqi households lost at least one family member between March 2003 and August 2007 due to the conflict, said data compiled by London-based Opinion Research Business (ORB) and its research partner in Iraq, the Independent Institute for Administration and Civil Society Studies (IIACSS).

The study based its findings on survey work involving the face-to-face questioning of 2,414 Iraqi adults aged 18 or above, and the last complete census in Iraq in 1997, which indicated a total of 4.05 million households.
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“We now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been in the order of 1,033,000,” ORB said in a statement.

The margin of error for the survey was 1.7 percent, making the estimated range between 946,000 and 1.12 million fatalities.

One million Iraqis killed in a “liberation” that they never asked for. One million Iraqis sacrificed for oil, for a Bush-family vendetta, or simply for American egotism. One million Iraqis whose blood is not only on the hands of the people who authorized this war, but on all of our hands for allowing this war to continue unchecked.

One million dead Iraqis. How many more will we allow to be killed?

Tags: death count, Iraq

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