As you may know, a trial balloon has been floated in the mainstream press by the Bush administration claiming that when civil war breaks out in Iraq our President will bring the troops home. The operative word being when. Well folks, I guess we know what that means — that this doesn’t equal civil war to Bush:
NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) – A suicide bomber killed at least 35 people and wounded more than 90 on Thursday near one of Shi’ite Islam’s most revered sites, the Imam Ali shrine in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf.
The attack was the bloodiest since July 18, when 59 people were killed by a suicide bomb in nearby Kufa. That attack was claimed by al Qaeda, which has targeted Shi’ites in a bid to inflame sectarian passions and trigger full-scale civil war.
Nor does this statistic represent a civil war is currently raging in Iraq, just a minor sectarian violence issue:
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Almost 2,000 bodies were taken to Baghdad’s morgue in July, the highest tally in five months of rising sectarian bloodshed which has forced the United States to boost troop levels in the capital to head off a civil war.
Morgue assistant manager Doctor Abdul Razzaq al-Obaidi said on Wednesday that about 90 percent had died violently.
Just for kicks, I thought I’d compare the current level of violence in Baghdad to what happened in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990’s where everyone admitted a civil war/ethnic cleansing was ongoing. Here’s what I discovered:
(cont.)
The pre-war population of the former Yugoslavia was about 23.5 million people, or roughly the size of the Iraqi population.
The war lasted from February, 1992 through 1995, or roughly the same span of time as the current conflict in Iraq (a little longer, bur let’s not quibble; Iraq is bound to catch up soon).
The estimated death toll for the conflict in the former Yugoslavia is estimated to be approximately 100,000 people, of which civilian deaths accounted for between 38,000 to 55,000 depending on who’s doing the counting. The remainder of the deaths were among “soldiers” however that term was defined by those doing the counting.
Using my meager math skills I divided 100,000 deaths by 47 months (the duration of the Yugoslav conflict by most accounts) and came up with the figure of 2,174 deaths per month during the war in the former Yugoslavia. That was for the entire country. As you can see, it compares favorably to the number of bodies delivered to the Baghdad morgue for the month of July.
Now some will say that the estimates of deaths in the former Yugoslavia were only estimates, and thus don’t make for a valid comparison. To that I can only say, the number of bodies delivered to the Baghdad morgue is only a rough estimate of the total number of deaths in the city of Baghdad last month, and the month before that, and the month before that. The United Nations has its own estimate of Iraqi deaths for the first 6 months of 2006: 14,000, or 2,333 per month. So I think my use of the number of bodies delivered to Baghdad’s morgue is more than reasonable.
Yet, the conflict in the former Yugoslavia was a civil war and the conflict in Iraq (according to Bush) is not. At least according to the matrix employed by the Bush administration. I guess I’m just not as smart as President Bush and his advisors, because I fail to see the difference, frankly.
One thing I do know. When someone in the Bush administration tell you what they will do if civil war breaks out, you can be damn sure they will never find that conditions in Iraq have devolved into a civil war. The bar will just keep getting raised. And Republicans will keep on blaming Democrats for Bush’s failures in Iraq.