Graphic of the Day: Fatalities Count from the Iraq War

This is from Reuter’s chart of the Day

According to a study released last week, the U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans. The war has killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number. When security forces, insurgents, journalists and humanitarian workers were included, the war’s death toll rose to an estimated 176,000 to 189,000

On the other hand, Agora Publishing founder Bill Bonner at the LFB writes of the cost of Iraq war which have been far more than such mainstream estimates.

Mehdi Hasan, writing in the New Statesman:

“Between 2003-06, according to a peer-reviewed study in The Lancet medical journal, 601,000 more people died in Iraq as a result of violence — that is, bombed, burned, stabbed, shot, and tortured to death — than would have died had the invasion not happened. Proportionately, that is the equivalent of 1.2 million Britons, or 6 million Americans, being killed over the same period.

“…31% of the excess deaths in Iraq can be attributed to coalition forces — about 186,000 people between 2003-06. Second, most studies show that only a minority of Iraqi insurgents were card-carrying members of AQI [al-Qaeda Iraq]. The insurgency kicked off in Fallujah on April 28, 2003, as a nationalist campaign, long before the arrival of foreign jihadists, but only after U.S. troops opened fire on, and killed, 17 unarmed Iraqi protesters.

“Third, there were no jihadists operating in Iraq before our Mesopotamian misadventure; Iraq had no history of suicide bombings. Between 2003-08, however, 1,100 suicide bombers blew themselves up inside the country. The war made Iraq, in the approving words of the U.S. general Ricardo Sanchez, ‘a terrorist magnet… a target of opportunity.’

“‘Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts,’ wrote the Iraqi blogger known by the pseudonym Riverbend on her blog Baghdad Burning in February 2007. ‘It’s worse. It’s over. You lost…You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out…You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power…’

“In September 2011, a Zogby poll found that 42% of Iraqis thought they were ‘worse off’ as a result of the Anglo-American invasion of their country, compared with only 30% of Iraqis who said ‘better off.’ An earlier poll conducted for the BBC in November 2005 found a slim majority of Iraqis (50.3%) saying the Iraq war was ‘somewhat’ or ‘absolutely’ wrong.”

In terms of the financial cost, we estimated that the war in Iraq would cost $1 trillion when it was launched. Dear readers wrote to say we were crazy. It was a cakewalk, they said. They said it could be accomplished for pennies.

But even $1 trillion was far too low. Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz may be an idiot, but he can add. And he puts the cost at over $5 trillion, perhaps $6 trillion, when the final bill for missing limbs and lifelong psychological care is tallied.

10th Year of the Invasion of Iraq: 20 Popular Lies

Yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq which had been dubbed as Operation Iraqi Freedom. A war fundamentally founded on deceit and political mendacities.

Glen Rangwala and Raymond Whitacker at the Global Research explains them

Here’s a snippet.  (bold and italics original)

Falsehoods ranging from exaggeration to plain untruth were used to make the case for war. More lies are being used in the aftermath

1 Iraq was responsible for the 11 September attacks

A supposed meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, leader of the 11 September hijackers, and an Iraqi intelligence official was the main basis for this claim, but Czech intelligence later conceded that the Iraqi’s contact could not have been Atta. This did not stop the constant stream of assertions that Iraq was involved in 9/11, which was so successful that at one stage opinion polls showed that two-thirds of Americans believed the hand of Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks. Almost as many believed Iraqi hijackers were aboard the crashed airliners; in fact there were none.

2 Iraq and al-Qa’ida were working together

Persistent claims by US and British leaders that Saddam and Osama bin Laden were in league with each other were contradicted by a leaked British Defence Intelligence Staff report, which said there were no current links between them. Mr Bin Laden’s “aims are in ideological conflict with present-day Iraq”, it added.

Another strand to the claims was that al-Qa’ida members were being sheltered in Iraq, and had set up a poisons training camp. When US troops reached the camp, they found no chemical or biological traces.

3 Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa for a “reconstituted” nuclear weapons programme

The head of the CIA has now admitted that documents purporting to show that Iraq tried to import uranium from Niger in west Africa were forged, and that the claim should never have been in President Bush’s State of the Union address. Britain sticks by the claim, insisting it has “separate intelligence”. The Foreign Office conceded last week that this information is now “under review”.

4 Iraq was trying to import aluminium tubes to develop nuclear weapons

The US persistently alleged that Baghdad tried to buy high-strength aluminum tubes whose only use could be in gas centrifuges, needed to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Equally persistently, the International Atomic Energy Agency said the tubes were being used for artillery rockets. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed El Baradei, told the UN Security Council in January that the tubes were not even suitable for centrifuges.

Read the rest here.

Here is Daily Reckoning’s Bill Bonner’s take

The trouble with the Iraq War is that the people who made the mistake have learned nothing. The lies and delusions behind the war never blew back into the faces of those responsible for them. Instead, soldiers, taxpayers, and innocent Iraqi civilians paid the price. Politicians, the military brass, and the pundits — notably Thomas Friedman — who promoted the war still walk on two legs and sleep soundly at night.

Read the rest here