Civilian Casualties: "What A Horrendous Number That Is"
Civilians suffer in every war, and Iraq is certainly no exception.
The estimates of how many innocent Iraqis have died since the American invasion vary widely but average out somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000. Think of a town near you with a comparable population, and you get some feeling for what a horrendous number that is. Iraq is a perfect example of what happens to civilians in a counter insurgency war. The insurgents deliberately target civilians to prove that the government in power is unable to protect them, and the counter insurgents -- in this case, American soldiers and Marines -- try to protect civilians until the government in power is capable of doing so on its own.
For a while, it looked like the American troop surge was having some success in bringing down civilian casualties. The U.S. military doesn't release body counts of civilians -- in part, because the numbers are unreliable and always subject to dispute -- but internal estimates had civilian deaths down by 46% in June. The car bombing this weekend in which an estimated 170 people were killed seems almost certain to reverse that trend. As bad as it seems, Iraq is probably not as bad as previous wars.
The Rawandan civil war claimed an estimated 800,000 lives, the civil wars in the Congo have claimed as many as two or three million. By those standards, Iraq is not a bloodbath. but what about Vietnam? That was the last time American troops fought a counter insurgency war. Again, the estimates are in dispute, but something like 500,000 South Vietnamese civilians are believed to have been killed. That in a population of 16 million compared to Iraq's 27 million. And a larger proportion of the Vietnamese deaths were caused by American military operations, since that was a war fought without the benefit of precision guided weapons.
There are a lot of military officers who believe that having unleashed this firestorm on Iraqi civilians, the U.S. now has a moral responsibility to continue its best efforts to protect them. The current troop surge is this country's best effort to protect Iraqi civilians. And given the implosion of political support for the war, it's probably the last.
