We often hear from people who complain - in hit and run fashion - about the "tens of thousands" of innocent Iraqis killed by "American cluster bombs" and other instruments of destruction that the "occupiers" are supposedly dropping on Saddam Hussein's once idyllic "Muslim land." Sometimes the claims run into the hundreds of thousands. Sometimes even the millions.
Not all of these folks are the wide-eyed Jihadi sympathizers that live among us here in the West (where they spend their time denouncing their host country and praying that their immigration status won't be revoked). Some are just sanctimonious anti-Americanists that use these ridiculous numbers to feel better about themselves.
Enter IraqBodyCount, an anti-war organization that was envisioned even before the Iraq War began, with the heady ambition of documenting each and every victim of American aggression in order to turn public opinion against the action to remove Saddam (let's just say they aren't too concerned about the hundreds of mass graves unearthed from the Ba'athist era).
Somewhere along the way, however, harsh reality began to sink in that America was acting as no other country in history has ever acted to prevent civilian casualties in warfare. As a matter of fact, more American troops have been killed in the conflict than have civilians been killed by Americans. Americans are literally taking casualties to prevent casualties on the part of Iraqi civilians.
Though mere mortals might be prompted to reconsider their prejudices at this point, the folks at IraqBodyCount reacted by quietly changing their mission to include the victims of terrorists - the very people that the Americans are trying to stop. Their dubious body-count even includes members of the Iraqi security forces, who are part of the coalition.
In other words, people who are killed trying to stop terrorists are counted as victims of their own effort - as if deadly attacks against the innocent should be tolerated by those in a position to discourage it. Of course, no one thinks this way in real life. Who would lay the blame for rape victims at the feet of those earnestly campaigning against sexual abuse?
Another big problem with IraqBodyCount's statistics is that they even include the terrorists themselves. Enemy combatants in Iraq don't wear uniforms or carry ID cards, and all it takes for someone to make the list is to wind up in a hospital or morgue with "trauma." How many true civilians were really killed by Americans at Fallujah? Probably very few.
Look further and you'll also find that one out of every 40 "war victims" on the list actually came from a stampede at a religious festival on a single day, August 31,2005, that neither the Americans, Iraqi security forces, nor even the terrorists were anywhere near. No doubt the Americans are somehow responsible for Hajj stampedes in Mecca as well.
Unfortunately, few of the people who quote IraqBodyCount's sensational numbers bother to put much thought into what they really represent. Fewer still choose to drill into the data to discover the identity of those who kill.
In fact, if you do make it through the donation solicitation pages on the main site and begin to browse their database, you'll notice that the tables are conspicuously missing a column - the party responsible for each attack.
There's a reason for this, as we discovered when we analyzed each incident to answer this question. It turns out that the vast majority of civilian deaths are caused by Islamic terrorists, and that very few are from American bombs and bullets. This is because (unlike the terrorists) the Americans aren't in Iraq to kill civilians.
Why does IraqBodyCount vilify Americans, who are literally giving their blood to help Iraqis, while protecting the activities of foreign terrorists, who enter the country specifically to kill innocent people? Because the Website and the terrorists both share an anti-American political agenda to which the lives of innocent Iraqis are secondary.
In fact, Iraqis are little more than statistics to these folks. And since the value of these statistics is substantially mitigated by presenting the full truth, IraqBodyCount wisely avoids identifying each incident by relevant context.
Since our sympathies are merely for the innocent, and not filtered by anti-American bigotry, we decided to sift through the data to discover the information that IraqBodyCount doesn't want you to know. We carefully examined their list of incidents from January 1, 2006 through May 9 to come up with some idea of who's really behind all those alleged civilian casualties.
Obviously it would have been easier to do this if IraqBodyCount kept track of the party responsible for each attack rather than, say, the time of day that it took place, but, as we found out, this extremely pertinent information completely undermines their preferred conclusions and so it is omitted (to the indifference of fawning new organizations).
Despite this imprecise science, we feel confident in our general findings.
Since the beginning of the year, there were two American air strikes - in which 21 civilians were killed along with the terrorists. There were also six incidents on the ground in which civilians were killed in crossfire between U.S. and terrorist elements. Although the Americans aren't trying to kill civilians and the terrorists are, we added these to our count anyway just to mitigate reasonable suspicion.
Out of 1,468 deadly attacks that resulted in civilian deaths, the Americans were involved in less than a dozen. IraqBodyCount often uses a "who really gives a rat's ass" method of counting deaths that even they have to admit contains overlap, so it's difficult to discern the true number of dead bodies from the beginning of the year, but the site appears to be reporting between 2,793 and 5,396 (so much for accuracy). What's clearer is that only about 44 of these involve American troops - or around 1 in 100.
[Editor's Note: Updated count through November 1st, 2006 is 15,191 dead Iraqi civilians, of which 130 were killed collaterally in incidents involving Americans]
So far, we have not seen a single non-combatant Iraqi civilian killed intentionally by the Americans. The handful of attributed deaths are either accidental or as a result of the collateral damage from a targeted attack against terrorists. By contrast, most of the civilians killed by Islamic terrorists are deliberately killed with extreme malice. |
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