The First Casualty Of War

international | anti-war / imperialism | other press

Monday November 09, 2009 14:26

by pat c

An important study which illustrates the paucity of US media reports of civilian deaths in Iraq. hence it is hardly shocking that US citizens are unaware tof the true extent of civilian casualties. Full story at related link.

In February of 2007 Associated Press conducted a survey of 1,002 adults across the United States about their perceptions of the war in Iraq. Whilst the respondents accurately estimated the death toll of U.S. soldiers (the median estimate was 2,974 while the actual toll at the time was 3,100), they grossly underestimated the number of Iraqi civilian casualties (the median answer was 9,890 at a time when several estimates put the toll at least 10 times that number and some as high as 50 times that number).

To assess the potential reasons for this discrepancy, Schuyler W. Henderson and colleagues at Columbia University examined 11 U.S. newspapers and 5 non-U.S. newspapers to collate the number of Coalition and Iraqi fatalities reported in the media between March 2003 and March 2008. They specifically looked at tallies (numbers of death over a period of time) and the descriptions of specific casualty events.

The results of their study showed U.S. newspapers reported more events and tallies related to Coalition deaths than Iraqi civilian deaths, although there were substantially different proportions amongst the different U.S. newspapers. In four of the five non-US newspapers, the pattern was reversed.

Notes:
Reporting Iraqi civilian fatalities in a time of war
Schuyler W Henderson, William E Olander and Les Roberts
Conflict and Health (in press)
http://www.conflictandhealth.com/

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Comments (2 of 2)

Nobody is keeping count

by Jim

Thu Nov 12, 2009 18:36

There is no official death toll - during heavy fighting like that occurred in Fallujah and other cities when US forces engaged Iraqi insurgents and jihadists fighters in a conventional battle the numbers of dead was impossible to determine.
Civilians were buried under collapsed buildings or buried by relatives after the fighting.
The only figures we can go on are the dead that arrive at the various morgues which are probably much lower than the real figure.
The best questimate is Iraq Body Count which places the death toll somewhere between 90,000 to 100,000.
While thousands of civilians have died through Coalition "friendly fire" and are classed as collatoral damage" it is indisputable that the vast majority of the dead were killed by Sunni or Shite Iraqi insurgents and militias and foreign jihadists who massacred huge numbers of innocents week after week in gun or suicide bomb attacks.

The pattern of post surge violence 2007-2009

Thu Nov 12, 2009 18:40

The situation is still grim in Iraq:

"This analysis looks at trends. But when examining the violence afflicting civilians in Iraq’s continuing conflict, a distinction must be drawn between abstractions represented by varying “rates” of violence and the reality of that violence for those experiencing it. Every statistic on this page can be traced to a human life violently ended, none of whom are any less a victim for having been killed during a “downward trend” in violence."

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The First Casualty Of War

Comments (2 of 2)