Sobering Statistics

This is Josh's email, and he's damn right:

Everyone should be forced to read Innumeracy. So on the car ride in this morning I asked Kat if she knew off the top of her head how many total people Saddam Hussein was accused of killing during his reign. I didn't know either but was guessing lots and lots. It turns out that after only about 5 minutes of researching this I was able to get all my statistics put together:

According to the Whitehouse's website:

a. 40 relatives
b. 30,000 chemical attacks against villages
c. 100,000 Kurds (The site says between 50 and 100,000, and it is not clear if this number includes the above numbers. For practical purposes, we'll just say 100,000 and that it is different than the above incidents).
d. 250,000 during religious uprisings (Again, it's hard to tell if this number is separate from the above. For practical reasons let's just say sure, it's different.)
e. 400,000 children due to malnutrition. (I'm having trouble with this one because there are any number of countries that face this same problem. But sure, we'll include them.)
f. And he executed 9,775 prisoners.

No doubt, Saddam was a homicidal maniac. So I am in no way excusing this behavior. It's a deplorable human rights record for a country. He was in power from 1979 to 2003 (I'm curious how these numbers look for Iraq for his predecessor. . . Is it Iraq or is it Saddam?)

Anyway, I digress: that's 24 years which comes out to 32,909 a year.

Unless we don't include the 400,000 children for malnutrition (theoretically those children are still starving now since there's not much electricity in cities and the infrastructure has been destroyed). Then it becomes: 389,815 total or 16,243/year for 24 years.

So go on over to www.iraqbodycount.org/, which includes all casualties (death not injuries) from the war not including US and British soldiers.

As of today, we're at between 62,144 to 68,141. Let's be conservative and say 62,144 with the war running from 2003 to 2007. That comes out to 15,536/year for 4 years.

16,243 deaths a year vs. 15,536: Y'up, the Iraqi people really are better off today than they were 5 years ago! Thanks, W!