How Many Iraqis Died in the Iraq War? [View all]

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http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/06/07/how-many-iraqis-died-in-the-iraq-war/


How Many Iraqis Died in the Iraq War?
Posted by Rebecca Hellmich


How many Iraqis died in the Iraq War? That's the kind of question that should be asked, especially if you happen to live in the countries that launched the war that killed so many.

The results from a new poll commissioned by the British media watchdog group MediaLens exposed a startling disconnect between the realities of the Iraq War and public perceptions of it: Namely, what the Iraqi death toll was. When Britons were asked "how many Iraqis, both combatants and civilians, do you think have died as a consequence of the war that began in Iraq in 2003?," 44 percent of respondents estimated that 5,000 or fewer deaths had occurred.

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These answers are, of course, way off the mark. Estimates of the death toll range from about 174,000 (Iraq Body Count, 3/19/13) to over a million (Opinion Business Research, cited in Congressional Research Service, 10/7/10). Even at the times of those U.S. polls, death estimates were far beyond the public's estimates.

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It seems that much of the mainstream media took Tommy Franks' infamous quote, "We don't do body counts" (San Francisco Chronicle, 5/3/03), to heart, because Iraqi victims of warfare were rarely of interest in news reports.

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