Say Anything Blog

One of the pillars of the anti-war movement is the "high level" of civilian casualties, or "collateral damage," seen in Iraq. Numerous studies have been done on this topic (one Lancet study put the number of civilian casualties at 100,000 over a year ago), but Logic Times points out some fallacies in the numbers being reported in these studies.

One of the foundation blocks of anti-war protest against the United States in Iraq is civilian casualties, which viscerally represents a country in ruin, a tragic human face on Bush’s warmongering. This perspective, of course, ignores the civilian carnage during the reign of Saddam Hussein (see Fuzzy Moral Math) and instead focuses on the perceived chaos in Iraq today. And this newfound concern for Iraqi civilian life is not only a staple of the anti-war Left, it is a convenient club wielded by mainstream Democrats in Washington, who argue that chaos in Iraq represents failed policy...

This study (by Iraq Body Count) reports 24,865 civilian deaths in the first two years of the Iraq War, an apparent ringing endorsement of the "Iraq in chaos" position. But a curious statistical anomaly jumps right off page one: over 81% of the civilian casualties are men. Even stranger, over 90% of civilian casualties are adults in a country with a disproportionate percentage of the population under 18 (44.5%). This contradicts a basic tenant of the civilian casualty argument, namely that we are describing collateral damage during a time of war. Collateral damage does not differentiate between male and female, between child and adult. A defective smart bomb falling in a marketplace, stray bullets ripping through bedroom walls, city warfare in Fallujah – all these activities should produce casualties that reflect the ratio of men to women or adults to children that prevail in Iraq as a whole.

The high level of adult males in these "civilian" casualty rates lead me to believe that the "civilians" being killed aren't really civilians at all but rather enemy combatants. To be truthful, I'm not sure how any accurate accounting can be made of "collateral damage" in a war where the enemy wears no uniform and hides behind the women and children of the country between attacks.

Read the whole thing.