 Eric
Mueller comments: READERS of this website know this
already but here are two stories from
respected western sources (which I found
quoted in Tuesday's al-Quds
al-Arabi) that cast serious doubt on
the official US stories on Iraq. The Guardian shows how the US is
fudging combat deaths -- something our
site has been pointing out for a long
time. The Financial
Times, meanwhile, quotes an
independent survey on how Iraqis
understand the resistance struggle. One should of course also regard these
reports critically. The Financial
Times says that "virtually all public
opinion research" shows that most Iraqis
want the occupation army to remain in
Iraq. This sounds like the type of result
one gets when surveying opinion in the
company of armed American troops. The Guardian, meanwhile,
legitimately casts doubt on how the US
distinguishes various types of fatalities
in Iraq, but does not fundamentally
question the total figures as a whole. For
my part, I'm not at all sure that I have
much faith in those numbers either.
 Arabist Eric Mueller
is this website's expert on Middle Eastern
affairs. He is a featured speaker at this
year's Real
History weekend at Cincinnati, August
29-September 3, 2003. |
--------------------------  Monday, August 4, 2003 The Guardian The unreported
cost of war: at least 827 American wounded
Julian Borger
Washington US MILITARY casualties from the
occupation of Iraq have been more than twice the
number most Americans have been led to believe
because of an extraordinarily high number of
accidents, suicides and other non-combat deaths in
the ranks that have gone largely unreported in the
media. Since May 1, when President George
Bush declared the end of major combat
operations, 52 American soldiers have been killed
by hostile fire, according to Pentagon figures
quoted in almost all the war coverage. But the
total number of US deaths from all causes is much
higher: 112. The other unreported cost of the war for the US
is the number of American wounded, 827 since
Operation Iraqi Freedom began. Unofficial figures are in the thousands. About
half have been injured since the president's
triumphant appearance on board the aircraft carrier
USS Lincoln at the beginning of May. Many of the
wounded have lost limbs. The figures are politically sensitive. The
number of American combat deaths since the start of
the war is 166 -- 19 more than the death toll in
the first Gulf war. The passing of that benchmark last month erased
the perception, popular at the time Baghdad fell,
that the US had scored an easy victory. According to a Gallup
poll, 63% of Americans still think Iraq was
worth going to war over, but a quarter want the
troops out now, and another third want a
withdrawal if the casualty figures continue to
mount. In fact, the total death toll this time is 248 -
including accidents and suicides -- and as the
number of non-combat deaths and serious injuries
becomes more widely known, the erosion of public
confidence is likely to continue, posing a threat
to Mr Bush's prospects of re-election, which at the
beginning of May had seemed a foregone
conclusion. Military observers say it is unusual, even in a
"low-intensity" guerrilla war such as the situation
seen in Iraq, for non-combat deaths to outnumber
combat casualties. The Pentagon does not tabulate the cause of
those deaths, but according to an American website
that has been tracking official reports, Iraq
Coalition Casualty Count, 23 American soldiers have
died in car or helicopter accidents since May 1,
while 12 have been killed in accidents with weapons
or explosives. Three deaths have been categorised as "possible
suicides", three have died from illness, and three
from drowning. The rest are unexplained. Wounded American soldiers continue to be flown
back to the US at a relentless rate, in
twice-weekly transport flights to Andrews air force
base near Washington. Hospital staff are working 70- or 80-hour weeks,
and the Walter Reed
army hospital in Washington is so full that it
has taken over beds normally reserved for cancer
patients to handle the influx, according to a
report on CBS television. Meanwhile, at the nearby national naval medical
centre in Bethesda, new marine injuries are
delivered almost daily by a medical plane known as
the Nightingale. The Pentagon figure for "wounded in action" in
Iraq is 827, but here again the total number of
injuries appears to be much higher. The estimate given by central command in Qatar
is 926, but according to Lieutenant-Colonel
Allen DeLane, who is in charge of the
airlift of the wounded into Andrews air base, that
too is understated. "Since the war has
started, I can't give you an exact number
because that's classified information, but I can
say to you
over
4,000 have stayed here at
Andrews, and that number doubles when you count
the people that come here to Andrews and then we
send them to other places like Walter Reed and
Bethesda, which are in this area also," Col
DeLane told National Public Radio. He said 90% of injuries were directly
war-related. Some of that number may involve double-counting
-- if a soldier stays at the Andrews clinic on the
way to Washington and then again on the way back to
the war or back home, for example. But the actual
number of wounded still appears to be much higher
than the official figures. "When the facility where I'm at started
absorbing the people coming back from theatre
[in April], those numbers went up
significantly -- I'd say over 1,200," Col DeLane
said. "That number even went up higher in the month of
May, to about 1,500, and continues to
increase."
Financial
TimesAugust 3 2003 Iraqis doubt US
explanation for continuing attacks By Charles Clover
in Baghdad FEWER than a third of Iraqis
believe the armed attacks against coalition forces
in their country are attributable to former Ba'ath
party operatives turned guerrilla, as US officials
suggest, a public opinion survey
suggests. The study reveals scepticism among Iraqis at the
US-led coalition's version of the postwar violence,
which US General John Abizaid likened to a
"classical guerrilla campaign" in remarks last
month. "We're fighting Ba'athist remnants throughout
the country. I believe there's mid-level Ba'athist,
Iraqi intelligence people, Special Security
Organisation people, Special Republican Guard
people that have organised at the regional level in
cellular structure," he said on July 16. US officials have yet to produce much public
evidence but many Iraqis believe the guerrillas are
a new phenomenon, fuelled by nationalism, Islamism,
and revenge. The
aftermath of war According to the survey, by the Iraq Centre for
Research and Strategic Studies (ICRSS), an
independent think-tank in Baghdad, 22 per cent of
Iraqis believe the attacks are actually provoked by
coalition forces' behaviour, while 25 per cent
believe them to be the work of "resistance forces"
-- a word which in Arabic implies a degree of
sympathy for the attackers. The data are particularly interesting if
concentrated on the cities of Ramadi and Falluja,
where many of the recent attacks have happened.
There, fewer than 5 per cent of those surveyed saw
former regime sympathisers behind the attacks, 36
per cent said the attacks were provoked by US
forces, and 52 per cent named "resistance" as chief
cause. If the impressions of those surveyed are true,
the postwar violence faced by the coalition in Iraq
is a more complicated phenomenon than US official
analysis would suggest. According to virtually all public opinion
research conducted thus far in Iraq, most Iraqis do
not want coalition forces to leave, and there is
broad support for the demise of Saddam
Hussein's regime. But sometimes behaviour by coalition troops and
failure to restore services in much of postwar Iraq
have eroded public support for the US-led military
presence. "Iraqis can't live with the coalition forces or
without them just yet," is one of the conclusions
of a study of focus group interviews by the US
National Democratic Institute published last month,
which found "no support for current attacks" but
that the behaviour of occupation troops sometimes
had a negative effect on opinion. The ICRSS results varied from region to region,
with predominantly Shia and Kurdish areas tending
to support the argument that former regime figures
were responsible for the violence, more so than in
Sunni areas. Overall, 2,400 Iraqis in seven cities across
Iraq were surveyed by ICRSS. Full results of the
survey are to be released on Wednesday. 
Walter
Reed army hospital in Washington is
full-
Radical's
Diary on US military casualties in Iraq:
"None of the newspapers
mentioned any 'coalition' deaths in that dorm
raid. "
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