Iraq War 2006 In Terms Of Human Costs
The statistics for Iraq War 2006 in terms of human costs have been high. A few days before the fifth anniversary of 9/11, a somber benchmark was breached - the U.S. military reported more deaths that raised the death toll to 2,974 soldiers in the administration's war on terror. There were 2,973 deaths in the 9/11 attack, a number that includes all American and foreign nationals who perished in that incident. It was in March 2003 when the United States invaded Iraq to punish the regime which, the Bush administration said, stockpiled thousands of weapons of mass destruction - munitions that have never been located.
The regime crumbled easily under the American juggernaut, but an insurgent-fueled rebellion has emerged and has proved much harder to subdue. The Iraq War 2006 thus involves U.S. soldiers fighting a different enemy, not a military force any longer. The Iraq War 2006 has not been any kinder to the Iraqi population. When the weapons of mass destruction could not be found at all, the administration began saying it waged war in Iraq to free the Iraqi people from oppression. Instead, it seems too many Iraqis have died up to Iraq War 2006. A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists, led by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University, has calculated that 655,000 more people have died in the country since March 2003 until Iraq War 2006 than would have died if there had been no invasion. That is a huge number. It is at least 20 times greater than the 30,000 estimated civilian deaths quoted by President Bush in December 2005. It is at least 10 times bigger than the 50,000 estimated civilian deaths given by Iraq Body Count, a British research group. It is bound to be controversial. This American group also published in 2004 the results of a scientifically measured study that estimated 100,000 deaths in 18 months from March 2003, when the invasion began. That earlier study and this Iraq War 2006 study are the only mortality estimate studies that used the scientifically accepted "cluster sampling" technique, which is utilized to obtain mortality estimates during famines and natural disasters. Though this Iraq War 2006 mortality estimate looks large, the researchers believe it is sound. There is not only consistency in results with the earlier survey, but there is also the fact that a great majority of deaths (almost four out of five) were substantiated by death certificates. This Iraq War 2006 mortality estimate has been developed from in-depth interviews on residents chosen by random sampling methods on households in various towns and cities throughout the country. It is very much higher than estimates leading to Iraq War 2006 made by other groups and the government of Iraq. The survey shows that the mortality rate per year before March 2003 was 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people; in the period after the invasion of March 2003, it had risen to 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people. The difference became the basis for calculating the "excess deaths." |