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Iraq-UK-USA: What price "liberation"?

01 August 2008

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In a follow-up to their August 2007 estimate that over 1 million Iraqis have been killed since the 2003 US-UK "liberation" of the country, the British polling organisation Opinion Research Business (ORB) has carried out new research that confirms the earlier figures. ORB, which has previously carried out research on behalf of the Conservative Party, and is headed by Gordon Heald who ran Gallop in the 1980s, conducted almost 600 additional interviews and "now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to be in the order of 1,033,000. If one takes into account the margin of error associated with survey data of this nature then the estimated range is between 946,000 and 1,120,000. In October 2006 research by a team from the US John Hopkins University published in the respected medical journal, The Lancet, estimated that there had been over 600,000 violent deaths up until June 2006.

The Lancet's results, which dovetail neatly with ORBs, have been rejected by the US, Iraqi and British governments. According to US General Tommy Franks, these governments "don't do body counts" (at least not of foreigners) but they are able to divine accurate figures and dismiss the felacious ones. Unsurprisingly, they prefer the Iraq Body Count (IBC) tally of around 90,000 deaths (which derives from English-language media outlets) or the US-sponsored Iraqi Government's estimate (for the World Health Organisation) of 150,000. ORB's work, which was undertaken by its Iraqi research partner, IIACSS, and is based on surveys undertaken in urban locations of the country that found that nearly 25% of their respondents said that at least one family member had died. Its 2007 report estimated that 48% of the fatalities died from gunshot wounds, 20% from the impact of a car bomb and 9% from aerial bombardment.

ORB "More than 1,000,000 Iraqis Murdered" (Sept 2007) http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78; ORB "Update on Iraq Casualty Figures" (January 2008) http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88; Iraq Body Count: http://www.iraqbodycount.org

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