Debunking The Body Count Myth

Here's one that I've been waiting to address for a long time:

Back when Fahrenheit Fact still had a comments section, one of our more colorful visitors claimed that the Coalition was just as bad as Saddam because we've murdered over 10,000 Iraqi civilians. His source? Iraq Body Count, a website dedicated to (in its own words) "[establishing] an independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq resulting directly from military action by the USA and its allies." Their online tally is up to 11,429 (as of Aug 5), and shows no sign of slowing down.

Now of all the distorting websites maintained by anti-war activists, I've always found those like Iraq Body Count to be the most distasteful and ill-conceived. By using pretty graphics, bold-type fonts, and professional-looking charts, IBC (like Time before it) hopes to divert attention from its specious reasoning and conjure a case from Ethos and Pathos. Don't believe me? Lets deconstruct:

The first false premise advanced by IBC relates to the nature of our military intervention in Iraq. By saying that their death tally "[resulted] directly from military action by the USA and its allies," the webmasters of Iraq Body Count are implying that every Coalition soldier, whether passive or active, is responsible for every Iraqi death listed on their site. It doesn't matter whether one of our soldiers actually pulled the trigger or fired the rocket - our military destabilized the region, and therefore every death that results is directly their fault.

Examples of this twisted reasoning are peppered throughout IBC's database. Take incidents # k022 and k023 for example, where 188 civilians en route to Shiite shrines were killed by "suicide bombers carrying explosives." Now, I'm a bit confused - is IBC saying that our soldiers strapped C4 onto their Kevlar vests and detonated themselves in the midst of these sojourners, or are they blaming us for failing to precognitively evacuate every pilgrim prior to the bombing? Neither - by virtue of our presence in Iraq, our troops were directly responsible for the violent actions of Moore's "minutemen".

Let's hypothetically suppose that Iraqi sovereignty never succeeds and violence in Iraq continues to escalate. Would IBC continue to blame the coalition for civilian deaths 10, 20, or even 50 years down the line? We've already determined that Coalition troops, not insurgents, are resonsible for every suicide bombing and civil disturbance - when will Western responsibility cease?

Interestingly, we can generalize IBC's implicit reasoning to conclude that the United Nations is directly responsible for the bombing-related deaths of 11 recent attendees at an Israeli Bar Mitzvah. After all, by supporting the Jewish relocation to Israel back in the 40's, the UN helped created a climate of "instability." The suicide bomber who blew the Israelis to pieces wasn't directly responsible for his actions - the world community was, for antagonizing him to act the way he did.

Furthermore, I'm disinclined to trust IBC's definition of a "civilian". In this new era of faceless terrorism, our enemies do not wear clearly marked uniforms or carry bright, colorful banners into battle. They are often plainclothes citizens who snipe from rooftops, knife soldiers in alleyways, or detonate bombs while operating moving vehicles. When a so-called "civilian" is found dead from what IBC innocuously terms "gunfire," how do they determine that he wasn't a threat to our troops? Perhaps U.S. soldiers were firing in self defense, or maybe a coalition-loyal Iraqi put a bullet in his neighbor Ahmir because he knew his fellow had a concealed gun. Aside from the now-defunct Republican Guard, there have been very few militant Iraqis who bother to clearly identify themselves as such.

But perhaps I'm being a bit too harsh. After all, some entries like x231 clearly show that Coalition forces killed 9 civilians by utilizing "'500lb laser-guided bombs' and Cobra attack helicopters". Surely the majority of Iraqi casualties were unambiguously identified in the following way. Right?

Wrong.

Even though there are several instances of "airstrike" and "bombings" on the website, the vast majority of the deaths on Iraq Body Count are almost impossible to trace (let alone identify as the Coalition's direct responsibility). I culled the following chart of the largest death toll entries on IBC in order to show how it "strains the gnat and swallows the camel." Observe:

Code	Date	Location	Weapons	Reptd. Min. Deaths	Reptd. Max. Deaths	Sources
x079	20 Mar 2003 - 24 Apr 2003	Municipality of Baghdad	-	778	1213	LAT 18 May CO 18 May
x096	20 Mar 2003 - 20 Apr 2003	Hospitals in Najaf, Karbala, Mosul, Samawa, Madain, Diwaniyah, Kut, Tikrit	various	484	445	AP 10 June BG 11 June
x038b	20 Mar 2003 - 06 Apr 2003	Nassiriya	various	633	633	CSM 22 May GDN 18 May Times 14 Apr CNN 06 Apr
x044	20 Mar 2003 - 09 Apr 2003	Basra Teaching Hospital	-	142	200	GUA 09 Apr AP 09 Apr AFP 09 Apr
x078	20 Apr 2003 - 15 May 2003	Baghdad	shootings	194	216	Ind 16 May CP 16 May
x132	14 Apr 2003 - 31 Aug 2003	Violent deaths recorded at Baghdad city morgue	60 per cent from gunshot wounds	1214	1297	KR 21 May IND 16 May CSM 16 May IWPR 06 Jun BG 03 Sep NYT 16 Sep LAT 16 Sep
x172	01 Sep 2003 - 30 Sep 2003	Violent deaths recorded at Baghdad city morgue	Over 55% by gunfire	362	367	IT 10 Oct Newsday 12 Oct
x334	01 Oct 2003 - 31 Mar 2004	Violent deaths recorded at Baghdad city morgue	Deaths from gunfire, explosions, etc. - 'excludes trauma deaths from accidents'	1605	1666	AP 23 May CBS 24 May
Minimum Ambiguously Reported Casualties: 5412 Maximum Ambiguously Reported Casualties: 6037 Conclusion: Of the casualties reported by iraqbodycount.net, almost one half (both minimum and maximum) of the reports are grouped en-masse and cannot be reliably traced back to coalition forces.

...and that's without including the suicide bombings and instances of infighting that pepper the entries on IBC's chart! I don't know about you, but I think citing 11,429 civilian deaths using the above methods is sloppy at best and deceitful at worst. With all the twisted logic and sketchy numbers employed by IBC, I almost feel sorry for its creators. They spent countless hours shoring up numbers from Reuters, AP, and other worldwide networks and combining them into neatly symmetrical charts, only to have their conclusions seriously shaken by a cursory examination of their hard-sought "facts."

Now don't get me wrong here - I'm not denying that Coalition bombs can go astray or that careless fire costs innocent lives. Every civilian killed in this conflict is a grievous loss that can never be replaced. I'm merely trying to point out how the presumptions and numbers employed by Iraq Body Count are serving to propogate lies and reenforce false assumptions about the character of our troops and the reality of this conflict.

If you have any comments to make on this post, feel free to post below. I'd love to hear some other perspectives on this issue as well.

-TRC