Sheila Provencher
Christian Peacemaker Teams
1 November 2004

When I returned to Baghdad yesterday, Um Yousif* and her husband — both Iraqi Christians who have lived here their entire lives — gave me a cake. Chocolate, with white-flowered frosting blobs and green lettering. “Wellcom to Baghdad,” it read.

“We’re sorry that the baker spelled the word wrong,” smiled Um Yousif. “But at least it is a big WELL.”

Unfortunately, things are far from well. Um Yousif does not leave her house, not even to buy groceries. Fear of violence or kidnapping reigns. “I do not think it will get better, even after our elections,” she said. “It will only change when the Americans leave. So many people just cannot bear that the American army is here. If they leave, there is no one left to fight. It could get better within months.”

She paused. “But my heart feels for the American soldiers and their families. So many killed. They are human beings. We are all human beings.”

by Juan Cole
from Informed Comment

President Bush said Tuesday that the Iraqis are refuting the pessimists and implied that things are improving in that country.

What would America look like if it were in Iraq’s current situation? The population of the US is over 11 times that of Iraq, so a lot of statistics would have to be multiplied by that number.

Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta, Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi, Gilbert Burnham
From The Lancet Journal

Summary

Background
In March, 2003, military forces, mainly from the USA and the UK, invaded Iraq. We did a survey to compare mortality during the period of 14·6 months before the invasion with the 17·8 months after it.

100,000 Iraqis Dead
380 tons of deadly explosives looted on the U.S. watch
Israel escalates new attacks against Gaza refugee camps
$70 billion in Congressional pipeline for next phase of war

by Phyllis Bennis
Institute for Policy Studies

As the election count-down goes into its final days, new evidence has come to the fore of just how high is the actual cost of the Iraq war and the administration’s disastrous Middle East policy.

According to a new report by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, Iraq has suffered a rise in the civilian death rate from 5% to 7.9% annually in the last 18 months. As a result, there have been 100,000 “excess deaths” of civilians in Iraq since the U.S. invasion began. Much of the rise in the death rate was due to violence, and the researchers cite U.S. air strikes on towns and cities as responsible for many of the deaths. Les Roberts, one of the report’s authors, told Reuters that, “the use of air power in areas with lots of civilians appears to be killing a lot of women and children. … What we have evidence of is the use of air power in populated urban areas and the bad consequences of it.”

The report is significant for several reasons. First, the credibility of Johns Hopkins and of The Lancet is virtually unchallengeable. The effort by Human Rights Watch to undermine the report’s veracity was limited to claims that the sample (988 households containing 7,868 people in 33 neighborhoods) was too small and that HRW investigation showed that the ground war, not bombing, caused more of the deaths. No one disputes that tens of thousands have died. Second, the report documents more than six times earlier estimates (from Iraq Body Count and others) of 16,000 civilian deaths. The report found that Iraqi civilians’ risk of death from violence in the period after the invasion was 58 times higher than before the war. Third, the report is the first to take into account the continuing consequences of the years of U.S.-imposed UN economic sanctions that are still devastating Iraqis.