LONDON - US President George W Bush has
acted swiftly in response to a report saying that
as many as 655,000 Iraqis had died as a
consequence of the US-led invasion and occupation
of Iraq.
"I don't consider it a credible
report," Bush said of the investigation by the
leading British-based medical journal, The Lancet.
General George Casey, the top American
military commander in
Iraq,
also expressed doubt. "That 650,000 number seems
way, way beyond any number that I have seen,"
Casey said. "I've not seen a number higher than
50,000 and so I don't give it that much
credibility at all."
While the report had
already created a stir, it was unlikely to alter
US policy, said James Denselow of the Royal
Institute for International Affairs in London. "It
is unlikely to have policy implications," Denselow
told Inter Press Service. "The US has always rode
roughshod over the issue of casualties. And with
this report out, Bush was saying today what he
said a year ago, that without the US there Iraq
will become a pariah state, that it will risk more
of September 11, I don't see any drastic change to
that."
But In the public eye "the report
does undermine the US project in Iraq", Denselow
said. "There have been other reports to say that
more Iraqis have been tortured under US occupation
than under Saddam [Hussein], and now we have a
report suggesting a higher ratio of deaths under
US occupation."
Bush had so far managed to
combine the war in Iraq and the "war on terror"
quite well. "But people are now seeing that the
Iraq war has created a harder problem that the
'war on terror' was intended to address," he said.
The conduct of the invasion had been shown
up to be "mismanaged and tragically
irresponsible", Denselow said. "But that does not
mean there will be a change in what the US is
doing."
The Lancet said the deaths were in
addition to the number of deaths from natural
causes. The new estimate is far higher than
earlier studies by The Lancet. In October 2004, it
published a paper indicating more than 100,000
excess deaths between March 2003 and September
2004 because of the invasion of military forces.
The new study estimates the deaths from
March 2003 to June 2006, and compares them with
the deaths in the pre-invasion period January 2002
to March 2003 in 47 randomly selected sites across
Iraq. That led to the figure of 655,000 - on
average more than 500 deaths a day more than in
pre-invasion Iraq.
The survey covered
1,849 households and 12,801 household members.
Each household was surveyed about births, deaths,
in-migration and out-migration in May and June
this year. Wherever there was a death, surveyors
asked for a death certificate, which was produced
in 92% of the cases.
The pre-invasion
mortality rate was 5.5 per 1,000 people per year,
while post-invasion this rose to 13.3 per 1,000
people per year. "This doubling of baseline
mortality constitutes a humanitarian emergency,"
the report says.
Most violent deaths were
due to gunshots (56%), the survey found. Air
strikes, car bombs and other explosions each
accounted for 13-14% of violent deaths.
Deaths attributable to the coalition
forces accounted for 31% of post-invasion violent
deaths, the report said. The study found that the
proportion of deaths attributable to coalition
forces diminished this year, the actual number of
people killed by the coalition forces rose.
The deaths meant that 2.5% of the
population of Iraq had died unnaturally under the
occupation, the report said. "Although such death
rates might be common in times of war, the
combination of a long duration and tens of
millions of people affected has made this the
deadliest international conflict of the 21st
century, and should be of grave concern to
everybody," the authors wrote in the report.
The study was carried out by a team led by
Gilbert Burnham of the John Hopkins Bloomberg
School of Public Health in Baltimore in the United
States.
The authors are demanding an
international inquiry. "We continue to believe
that an independent international body to monitor
compliance with the Geneva Conventions and other
humanitarian standards in conflict is urgently
needed," they said. "With reliable date, those
voices that speak out for civilians trapped in
conflict might be able to lessen the tragic human
cost of future wars."”
