A radio interviewer in South Africa asked me what had been the response of the "mainstream media in the United States" to the ongoing estimate of the Iraqi death toll from the U.S. invasion and occupation, which last week crossed the one million mark. Sadly, I had to report that it has been ignored by mainstream media, even the wire services. But this is hardly surprising. The "Lancet study," you'll recall, was a study published last fall in the British medical journal The Lancet, which estimated that more than 600,000 Iraqis had had been killed as a result of the invasion as of July 2006.
The media largely buried the Lancet study when it was published - and have largely ignored the question of the overall death toll from the U.S. invasion - so it's little surprise that they have ignored our attempt to shine a light on this question.
The Lancet study is the only existing study that uses the method accepted all over the world for estimating deaths due to large-scale violent conflict: a cluster survey.
Increasingly, the U.S. occupation is described as a passive onlooker to the violence. This is deeply misleading for two reasons. First, the civil war - or civil wars - that have been unleashed in Iraq was a predictable - and predicted - result of the U.S. invasion. For example, James Baker gave the threat of unleashing a civil war as a key reason why the U.S. didn't go to Baghdad in 1991, so it's absurd to treat this as an unforeseeable consequence. Second, the picture is being obscured by underreporting in the U.S. of deaths from U.S. air strikes, raids, and shooting at checkpoints.
[Excerpt of an article by Robert Naiman, The Huffington Post]
No comments:
Post a Comment