5/14/2008

Iraqi Civilian Death Count

The debate is raging about how many Iraqi civilians have actually died during this war. The New England Journal of Medicine just published their findings, which is different from John Hopkins University’s findings.

The New England Journal of Medicine estimates deaths of civilians to be around 104,000 to 223,000.

John Hopkins University has done two national surveys in Iraq and have estimated the deaths at approximately 600,000 .

So those who want to make political hay out of this will say that those liberals at Johns Hopkins are inflating the numbers to make things look worse than they actually are.

But the question remains:
If our invasion of Iraq has cost at least 100,000 civilian deaths, how good can we, as a nation or as Christians who follow the Prince of Peace, feel about this?

Evangelical Christians have been the most supportive of this war. I believe we have some repenting to do.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You sir...are an idiot...the US did not purposely set out to kill innocent Iraqi civilians....Saddam Hussein did...oh but no one cares Saddam is gone! Nice picture by the way. And, how do we know that boy was hurt by the US?????

Ted M. Gossard said...

Bob,
I couldn't agree with you more. This is a tragedy, nothing short of it. Of course you would expect me to agree with my anabaptist leanings.

But Christians in the great and good tradition of "just war", Augustine, C.S. Lewis, Reinhold Niebuhr, also have problems and issues with this war.

I think there was a much better way to deal with this problem. And the civilians that are killed over there due to our intervention do greatly matter.

Anonymous said...

To say the US didn't purposely set out to kill innocent Iraqi civilians is like saying a drunk driver didn't intentionally intend to kill the people he crashes into.

The Bush administration is guilty of gross negligence from day one of this war and occupation. It was ill planned and ill executed and innocent blood has been spilled because of this. We chose this path.

That is undeniable.