As the war in Iraq drags on, many of us are simply inured to the notion of violence so far distant from our daily lives. It is worthwhile to take a moment of silence and ponder the unknown costs of this war in human lives.

One site to visit is www.iraqbodycount.org, "The worldwide update of reported civilian deaths in the Iraq war and occupation." In the Bikes Not Bombs March update letter that we mailed to many of you, we used www.iraqbodycount.org for the estimate of "at least 65,000" Iraqi civilian lives lost as a result of this war. The researchers for Iraq Body Count point out that the total they give "refers to reported deaths - which can only be a sample of true deaths unless one assumes that every civilian death has been reported. It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media." Since the hot spots of fighting are often no-go zones for the media, it seems a good assumption that "most" civilian deaths d go unreported, which would make the true count of civilian dead at least well over 100,000 people.

A much higher estimate - over 650,000 Iraqi's dead as a result of the war - was given by the British medical journal The Lancet in October 2006. We quoted this publication in the Bikes Not Bombs update of Nov/Dec 2006. The Lancet study compared total mortality before the war to an estimate of total mortality during the war. The total given is thus an estimate of "excess deaths," that is, how many people are dying (of many different causes) who wouldn't have died if the war hadn't happened. The study estimated 600,000 of these deaths to be from violence. The estimates were based on samples from each area of Iraq, and the total was extrapolated, since the true counts are not being done.

Another site details American casualties reported by the US Department of Defense: http://icasualties.org. Here 3,366 US soldiers are reported as dead, with about 25,000 wounded. Also listed are contractors and people of other nationalities killed in Iraq.

None of these totals include the Iraqi armed forces lives lost in the initial fighting, nor the Iraqi security forces killed while working with the occupation. Neither do they include Iraqi civilians wounded.

So the numbers are astounding. Some controversy surrounds the difference between the media-reported count given by iraqbodycount.org and the much higher extrapolation made by the Lancet, and a criticism of the Lancet figures can be read on the iraqbodycount site. Somewhere between 65,000 and 650,000 lies a number that we could eventually call the true Iraqi civilian toll to date, but wherever it falls it is an overwhelming human tragedy. "On 9/11 3,000 people were violently killed in attacks on the USA. Those events etched themselves into the soul of every American, and reverberated around the world. In December 2005 President George Bush acknowledged 30,000 known Iraqi violent deaths in a country one tenth the size of the USA. That is already a death toll 100 times greater in its impact on the Iraqi nation than 9/11 was on the USA." (iraqbodycount.org)

The longer we allow the war to continue, we can only expect more tragedy. "On every available indicator the year just ended (March 2006 – March 2007) has been by far the worst year for violence against civilians in Iraq since the invasion." (iraqbodycount.org)