Iraqi Civil War Toll Reaches 23,000 for Year

The Iraqi Health Ministry reports that its own quasi-official count of Iraqi civilians and police killed in the country's civil war over the past year was 22,950 and acknowledged that those numbers are "incomplete," meaning the actual tally is probably higher.

Lets put that in perspective. The population of Iraq is approximately 25 million, or one-twelfth the population of the United States. Imagine if the U.S. had a war in which 275,000 civilians and police died in just one year.

The figures are actually much grimmer. Much of Iraq is quite calm--Shi'ite dominated Basra to the south and Kurd dominated areas to the north are relatively stable. Most of the violence is in and around Baghdad, a city with about the same population as metropolitan Washington, D.C. Imagine if the Washington metro area had 23,000 violent deaths in one year! (We have fewer than 1000 murders per year in the metro D.C. region.)

Worse yet, the violence escalated rapidly in the latter half of the year. For the last six months of 2006, the Iraqi Health Ministry recorded 17,310 deaths, mostly in the Baghdad region. If violence continues at that pace in 2007, Iraqis will see another 35,000 deaths. That would be like 400,000 in the U.S.

One major problem in Iraq: most of the men arrested or captured by U.S. forces and Iraqi military and police units are released shortly after their detention. An interesting op-ed piece in today's Wall Street Journal by Bing West and Eliot Cohen notes that the Iraqi jail population of 28,000 inmates is far smaller than that of Texas, with 170,000 prisoners despite Texas having a smaller population and far less violence. (West and Cohen advocate using U.S. soldiers as police and reforming the Iraqi "catch and release" program--another of many misguided proposals to have American troops solve Iraqi problems.)

We've said it here before and we'll say it again: the U.S. presence in Iraq is doing no good and probably adding to the harm. We need to draw down our troop presence and reposition units in friendly neighboring countries, such as Kuwait, as well as in remote bases within Iraq (such as in friendly Kurdish territory). Yes, there will be "chaos." There already is. We need to let the Iraqis come up with their own solution, something they can't do as long as we're there tilting the scales. [For example, at present, U.S. troops are engaged in counterinsurgency against Sunni fighters, but not involved in any meaningful efforts to repress Shi'ite death squads. We are, in effect, helping the Shi'ites in this civil war.]

Sadly, our President, whose incompetence got us where we are now, intends to compound his errors by sending more troops off on an impossible mission. How sad.