What the author of "The Civilian Casualty Fable" <http:// www.logictimes.com/civilian.htm> fails to understand, concerning its objection to Iraq Body Count, is not so much statistics as the nature of war in Iraq. The author writes that "This study 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%)." Are such facts really strange, though?
If you look at the age- and gender-divided civilian casualty profile of, say, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the demographic breakdown of casualties probably won't be far off from that of the population in the geographic areas destroyed by the bombs and and impacted by radioactive falllouts. That's not the kind of war that we are seeing in Iraq.
The casualty profile in Iraq that Iraq Body Count compiled resembles what you see in those of many counter-insurgency wars and civil wars. Let's take one example from each type of warfare:
<blockquote>Case Study: The Anfal Campaign (Iraqi Kurdistan), 1988
The most detailed investigation, conducted by HRW/ME, tabulated the number of "disappeared" from the various stages of Anfal, based on field interviews with some 350 survivors. The organization gathered the names of 1,255 men, 184 women, and 359 children -- "only a fraction of the numbers lost during Anfal." This would suggest that some 87 percent of the adults "disappeared," all of whom were apparently executed, were male; and that about 70 percent of all those who "disappeared" were "battle-age" males. (See Iraq's Crime of Genocide, pp. 266-68.)
<http://www.gendercide.org/case_anfal.html></blockquote>
<blockquote>Case Study: Bosnia-Herzegovina
[T]he overwhelming weight of testimony and recorded evidence suggests a heavy preponderance of "battle-age" males among the dead -- probably over 80 percent. One clue can be gleaned from the lists of missing persons from the Bosnian conflict. The International Committee of the Red Cross has noted that "the majority of missing persons [in Bosnia-Herzegovina] are men ... Of the approximately 18,000 persons registered by the ICRC in Bosnia-Herzegovina as still missing in connection with the armed conflict that ended there in 1995, 92% are men and 8% are women." (ICRC, "The Impact of Armed Conflict on Women", 6 March 2001.)
<http://www.gendercide.org/case_bosnia.html></blockquote>
The assumption that women and men, minors and adults, must necessarily be represented among civilian casualties in numbers proportionate to their numbers in the population as a whole is a mistaken one.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>