wars' civilian casualties:

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-01-2003
wars' civilian casualties:
1
Wed, 08-18-2004 - 7:58am
Study details wars' civilian casualties:

"People don't want to hear bad news that they themselves have

caused," said

Shiels, 55.

http://www.thejournalnews.com/newsroom/080204/a0102casualties.html

By ERNIE GARCIA

THE JOURNAL NEWS

August 2, 2004


DOBBS FERRY — The concern over innocents dying in attacks on outlaw

regimes is as old as the Bible, in which God agreed with the Prophet

Abraham's petition to spare Sodom if 10 righteous men could be found

there. The 10 were not found.

And a study of the past 100 years of American warfare by a local

professor shows the United States is edging toward a more divine

standard — sparing innocents during recent military campaigns.

But Mercy College history professor Frederick Shiels, the study's

author, also argues that news coverage of current conflicts in Iraq

and Afghanistan illustrates Americans' indifference or aversion to

details about these deaths, reduced as they may be compared with

previous American wars.

"People don't want to hear bad news that they themselves have

caused," said Shiels, 55.

Shiels' most recent work, studying the number of Iraqi civilians

killed in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, is part of a larger study

on American wars between the 1901 Philippine Insurrection and the

2001 invasion of Afghanistan against the Taliban and al-Qaida.

He estimates that 6,000 to 8,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed by

the U.S. military since March 2003, when the war began. In

Afghanistan, Shiels estimates, 3,000 civilians were accidentally

killed by American-led coalition forces.

Shiels' estimate is relatively conservative. Other sources put the

figures higher, including a June 24 Foreign Policy in Focus report

that estimated 9,300 to 11,400 civilians had been killed in Iraq

since the war began.

About 3,100 American civilians have been killed since the Sept. 11,

2001, attacks, with virtually all of them at the hands of criminal or

terrorist organizations.

Counting civilian deaths during warfare is an inexact endeavor,

Shiels said. For wars in the 20th century, he has relied on archival

sources, while his Iraq and Afghanistan counts consist of press

accounts, nongovernmental organizations' Web sites and U.S. military

reports.

Foreign civilian deaths, Shiels said, have not received the same

coverage by American press as they have by European or Arab media.

Shiels cited the difference in coverage of the Abu Ghraib prisoner-

abuse scandal relative to Iraqi civilian deaths as an example of

skewed coverage.

"The coverage of (Abu Ghraib) was tremendous because it had a lurid

component," he said. "But what about the conservative 6,000 to 8,000

people that have died because of the military acting to displace

Saddam Hussein? The reporting by comparison is fractional."

Shiels said the underreporting is partially driven by commercial

interests. "If you assume that the media are in some sense business

driven — they have to sell papers or competitive air time — then they

are going to want to report news that more directly affects the lives

of their audiences, and that's always going to be American soldiers

killed. American soldiers experiencing a lack of supplies or

hardships is always going to trump peasants or country people in

foreign places who are killed, especially if they are killed in what

some Americans think of as a greater cause."

Nick Mottern, 65, a Vietnam veteran and peace activist from

Peekskill, said, "The public does not understand the day-to-day

civilian toll. People imagine what's going on, but they don't feel

it."

The U.S. government has no estimate of civilian casualties in Iraq.

When asked via e-mail to comment on the estimates of civilian war

dead, Staff Sgt. Troy Hawkes with the U.S. Coalition Press

Information Center said, "We are deeply saddened when anyone is

killed. The fact that many of these deaths are a result of terrorist

attacks against innocent people is a further tragedy and it

emphasizes the need for a secure and stable environment in Iraq."

U.S. military deaths since the end of major combat operations in Iraq

in May 2003 now stand at 911, according to the Defense Department.

There are no official casualty counts for the Iraqi military, but the

site antiwar.com, a division of the Randolph Bourne Institute,

estimates the Iraqi military's casualties between 4,895 to 6,370.

Shiels began his civilian casualty studies in 2003 to create history-

course study materials and to address what he describes as

discrepancies in U.S. media and history books and the reality of

intentional or accidental harm inflicted on civilians by the

military.

In the proposal for his original study on the 20th century, Shiels

estimated that 6 million civilians have died as a direct result of

U.S. military actions since 1940. He does not suggest all those

deaths imply the same responsibility for the United States, but he

observed that discussion of the deaths "has been strangely lacking

outside of professional peace circles."

Taken in its entirety, from the Philippine Insurrection to today's

Iraq conflict, Shiels said his study presents a common thread for

those interested in U.S. history.

"We invaded the Philippines to liberate, pacify and to establish

order," Shiels said of the three-year war that he estimated to have

killed 4,200 U.S. soldiers and caused 200,000 civilian deaths. The

United States claimed the war liberated the archipelago from Spanish

colonial rule.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-22-2003
Fri, 08-20-2004 - 3:49pm
Very good article. It is sad that American media is so skewed.