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Four years after ‘Mission Accomplished’, Iraqi death toll suppressed

It was four years ago today that President Bush announced from the deck of an aircraft carrier off California that “major combat operations” in Iraq had ended.

Under a banner reading “Mission Accomplished“, the president said the US had won “the battle of Iraq” while sparing civilian lives:

For a hundred of years of war, culminating in the nuclear age, military technology was designed and deployed to inflict casualties on an ever-growing scale. In defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, Allied forces destroyed entire cities, while enemy leaders who started the conflict were safe until the final days. Military power was used to end a regime by breaking a nation.

Today, we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war; yet it is a great moral advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent.

But it’s not easy to tally the civilian deaths, especially since the Iraqi government decided recently to withhold information.

Writing at CJR Daily, Gal Beckerman says a human rights report from the UN last Thursday contained no figures for civilian casualties in Iraq. The previous report, issued in January, had cited 34,000 civilian deaths during 2006.

Beckerman says the New York Times and the Washington Post simply reported that casualty numbers were being withheld, but:

In a commendable show of gumption, reporters from the LA Times found anonymous sources in the relevant ministries who helped them piece together an estimate of the number of deaths since the start of the year. The paper reported Thursday that there were 1991 deaths in January, 1646 in February, and 1872 in March, right after the new Baghdad security plan was implemented. That would be about 5500 civilian deaths since the start of the year, a number the article says is consistent with the 4766 reported on the website, icasaulties.org.

Beckerman concludes:

If the Iraqi government won’t readily give up these statistics, and the UN subsequently can’t print them, it becomes even more crucial that journalists do all they can to get them anyway.