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October 17, 2006
Numbers
I've been trying to wrap my head around some numbers all of last week, with the publishing of the Hopkins study.
2.5 percent of the population. 600,000 dead from violence. An increase in the number of deaths caused by the occupying forces to 31 percent.
We already had a strong sense of the scale of the violence in Iraq. Number counts from morgues, hospitals, news reports all indicated a dramatic spike in violence since the Samarra bombing last February.
Meanwhile, yesterday's big news story was that the U.S. population is now estimated to be 300 million. As I was rolling my eyes about the relative importance of a round number, I did a quick calculation. Hopkins researchers put the Iraq excess mortality due to violence at 2.5 percent of the population which would scale to 7.5 million for the United States. That's almost the total population of New York City.
To understand the horror of what's going on in Iraq, imagine every single person in New York city killed. Every last one of them. Imagine 2.5 million of them dying from the bombing and shooting from an occupying force. The rest killed in carbombs, shootings, executions, beheadings. In the space of a few years.
Now imagine that was called peace and freedom.
Posted by zeynep at October 17, 2006 10:37 AM