How many dead?

How many Iraqis have been killed in the invasion? This is apparently not easily answered. President Bush said 30,000 in December of 2005. As large as this number is when tallying deaths, it was wildly inconsistent with a Lancet medical journal article of October 2006 that estimated 655,000 deaths as a result of war, with 601,000 of these from violence in war. This estimate was based on a study conducted by Johns Hopkins University.

After President Bush gave his 30,000 estimate Scott McClellan said on his behalf there was no official tally and Bush had gotten his number from the media. The Lancet article is a peer reviewed article using the type of national, cross-sectional cohort study of death used to find out how many people die from TB or malaria.

A group called Iraqi Body Count keeps a running tally that estimates today 88,373 to 96,466. Iraq Body Count uses reports from morgues and hospitals to produce their numbers. Lancet medical journal discusses the problem of relying on reports. When a whole family is killed there are often no reports made and some areas have stopped issuing death certificates at all.

The World Health Organization recently issued an estimate of 151,000.

However many the number may be, all guesses seem to concur that most of the deaths are civilians and many are children. Lancet estimates include children under 14, women and people over 65 years of age. One measure of percentage of deaths who are civilians can be based on the reports of Iraqi military deaths-between 4900 and 6375 according to WHO.

These numbers do not include the American deaths, some 3,915 according to WHO, or the 174 British forces killed.

Lancet stated, "In Iraq, as with other conflicts, civilians bear the consequences of warfare. In the Vietnam war, 3 million civilians died; in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, conflict has been responsible for 3.8 million deaths; and an estimated 200,000 of a total population of 800,000 died in conflict in East Timor. Recent estimates are that 200,000 people have died in Darfur over the past 31 months. We estimate that almost 655,000 people--2.5% of the population in the study area--have died in Iraq. Althou such death rates might be common in times of war, the combination of a long duration and tens of millions of people affected has made this the deadliest international conflict of the 21st Century."

A group called Just Foreign Policy posts a running extrapolation from the Lancet study that states the number of deaths at 1,273,378 as of today.

At some point an ocean of blood takes us beyond the ability to imagine. If the estimates of the number of deaths based on a Lancet study are correct, the death toll would have spilled some 6,500,000 quarts of blood. It only takes 600,000 quarts to fill an olympic size pool. Think of a thousand olympic pools filled with blood, and then it all begins to overflow and run out onto the ground. Irrigating what? What grows from this?

Will President Obama End the War?

I just heard Obama on a 60 Minutes interview avow that his first executive action would be to call together the Joint Chiefs of Staff and develop a plan to end the war in Iraq. He used plenty of qualifiers like "safely" to describe how the war would be ended. I hope he means to end the war and the qualifiers don't stretch the war out another four or eight years.

I plan to vote for Obama if I'm still above ground in November. The first reason I voted for him in the primary election was that I thought he was the candidate most likely to end the war, at least after it was clear Dennis Kucinich would not be on the ballot.

But I think we must be clear that voting is not a substitute for anti-war organizing, argument, protest or war resistance. There is profit in war and, therefore, almost never can there be a political solution. Public opposition to war can bring a Republican war to an end. Without opposition, the Democrats may well wage war without end. The structural incentives for war are too tempting for any party in power to resist.

If popular opinion really mattered in policy to end war, the 2006 elections should have made a difference, but they didn't.

This is the first time in two years I have thought the Democrats might win the 2008 election. I have dreading, but predicting, a McCain victory since last summer when he was still in the tank in the polls. I thought he would beat Hillary in November. The main factor I misjudged was Obama's internet fund raising. I thought by now a Republican propaganda machine would have dumped a half a billion dollars smearing anyone who had the misfortune to get the Democratic nomination. If Obama ends October spending more money than McCain the smearing is neutralized, or at least equalized. The other factor appears to be the timing of the collapse of capitalism for this September. I am not sure that is what is happening, but whatever is going on, it can't be good for Republicans. Even with McCain now making noises like Paul Sweeney, it seems incredible that anyone would believe him.

Back to Obama and the war. With a McCain presidency the need for an anti-war movement was clear (if the war is ever to end). With an Obama presidency, we should know by the end of January if the war will end. If not, the anti-war community should not give him a break because he is a Democrat.