By Tom Engelhardt
<snip> Nonetheless, in a piece published last year in the British medical journal The Lancet, a group of researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad did a household study of civilian deaths in Iraq (knocking on doors in 33 places in the country for almost 8,000 interviews, a dangerous task indeed). They estimated, based on their work, that somewhere around 100,000 Iraqi civilians, a majority of them women and children, had died due to the invasion and the ongoing occupation of the country and the insurgency. This study, for reasons well explained by Lila Guterman (Dead Iraqis) in the Columbia Journalism Review, was barely reported on in the American press, though the figures, approximate as they must be, are nonetheless probably conservative, or so concludes Guterman. Based on this study, it would not, she adds, be unreasonable to assume that in the five months since the paper came out, if "the death rate has stayed the same, roughly 25,000 more Iraqis have died."
Oh, one figure on the Iraqi and Afghan dead did come to light last week. One hundred and eight of them managed to die "in American custody," and "most of them violently, according to government data provided to The Associated Press. Roughly a quarter of those deaths have been investigated as possible abuse by U.S. personnel." This is assuredly but the tip of some iceberg or other.<snip>
Among journalists (and "assistants"), 48 seem to have died since the war began; according to the Columbia Journalism Review, Iraq remains "the most dangerous place in the world to work as a journalist" and (depending on whom you are counting) between 33 and 39 of them died in 2004 alone. Above all, according to CJR's Mariah Blake, you don't want to be an Arab journalist in Iraq. It's practically the equivalent of a death sentence. As a result, while Iraq's insurgency has grown ever fiercer, devolving events in the country have become ever harder to cover. "
ven the Arab media are finding themselves increasingly reliant on secondhand accounts and official reports from Washington and Baghdad, and less able to gauge how events are playing out in the lives of ordinary Iraqis. 'We can no longer get close to people's suffering, people's hopes, people's dreams,' says Nabil Khatib, Al Arabiya's executive editor for news. 'We no longer know what's really going on because we can no longer get close to reality.'"<snip>
<snip from Juan Cole:> "Readers often write in for an update on Fallujah. I am sorry to say that there is no Fallujah to update. The city appears to be in ruins and perhaps uninhabitable in the near future. Of 300,000 residents, only about 9,000 seem to have returned, and apparently some of those are living in tents above the ruins of their homes…. The scale of this human tragedy -- the dispossession and displacement of 300,000 persons -- is hard to imagine. Unlike the victims of the tsunami who were left homeless, moreover, the Fallujans have witnessed no outpouring of world sympathy. While there were undeniably bad characters in the city, most residents had done nothing wrong and did not deserve to be made object lessons--which was the point Rumsfeld was making with this assault. He hoped to convince Ramadi and Mosul to fall quiet lest the same thing happen to them. He failed, since the second Fallujah campaign threw the Sunni Arab heartland into much more chaos than ever before. People forget how quiet Mosul had been. And, the campaign was the death knell for proper Sunni participation in the Jan. 30 elections (Sunnis, with 20 percent of the population, have only 6 seats in the 275 member parliament). However much a cliché it might be to say it, the US military really did destroy Fallujah to save it." <snip>
http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2005/03/iraq_year_three.html
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