Americans rarely know how many they’ve killed

Ask anyone how many were killed as a result of the Vietnam War, and even those who lived through it will give you a number like 200,000, at most.

The real number, counting both military and civilians, is in the millions.

Now ask someone how many deaths the Occupation of Iraq has caused. They’ll give you a number like 50,000 or so.

They are also wrong.

“Americans unaware of Iraqi death toll”

WASHINGTON – One person can tell you precisely how many Americans have been killed in Iraq. Another pays close attention to the names and hometowns of those who die each week. A third mourns for the families of fallen U.S. troops, but also figures it was their choice to enlist.

Americans are keenly aware of how many U.S. forces have lost their lives in Iraq, according to a new AP-Ipsos poll. But they woefully underestimate the number of Iraqi civilians who have been killed.

When the poll was conducted earlier this month, a little more than 3,100 U.S. troops had been killed. The midpoint estimate among those polled was right on target, at about 3,000. …

The number of Iraqis killed, however, is much harder to pin down, and that uncertainty is perhaps reflected in Americans’ tendency to lowball the Iraqi death toll by tens of thousands.

Iraqi civilian deaths are estimated at more than 54,000 and could be much higher; some unofficial estimates range into the hundreds of thousands. The U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq reports more than 34,000 deaths in 2006 alone.

Of course, some studies go much, much further.

“Iraq Death Toll Rivals Rwanda Genocide, Cambodian Killing Fields”

According to a new study, 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion, the highest estimate of war-related fatalities yet. The study was done by the British polling firm ORB, which conducted face-to-face interviews with a sample of over 1,700 Iraqi adults in 15 of Iraq’s 18 provinces. Two provinces — al-Anbar and Karbala — were too dangerous to canvas, and officials in a third, Irbil, didn’t give the researchers a permit to do their work. The study’s margin of error was plus-minus 2.4 percent.

Americans have a mental block when it comes to killing foreigners. We just refuse to believe that our policies have led to millions and millions of deaths around the globe. But they have. And more will have been killed by the time you finish reading this.

–WKW