Civilian casualties

The Iraq Body Count Database will be keeping a running total of "civilian deaths in Iraq resulting directly from military actions by the USA and its allies in 2003." Body count so far: 15. (Since sources may differ, they provide both a minimum and a maximum. Note that since they're talking about direct results of military actions, deaths from malnutrition and other causes won't be included.) Also provides a cute little auto-update graphic that you can include on a web page to count along at home. Their background and methodology page provides useful info about how and why they're doing this. (Thanks, Fred!)

Nick provides a link to a fascinating article from Air & Space Power Chronicles on "Bombing Dual-Use Targets":

["Dual-use targets" are] targets, such as electrical power facilities, that impact both military operations and civilian lives. A key example of such dual-use targeting was the destruction of Iraqi electrical power facilities in Desert Storm. While crippling Iraq's military command and control capability, destruction of these facilities shut down water purification and sewage treatment plants. As a result, epidemics of gastroenteritis, cholera, and typhoid broke out, leading to perhaps as many as 100,000 civilian deaths and a doubling of the infant mortality rate.

It's a fairly long article, and I haven't yet read all of it in detail, but what I've read is very interesting. For example:

The US maintained its insistence on daytime, precision bombing until the late winter of 1944, when bad weather often obscured target areas. Since "it was unthinkable not to use the bombers simply because visual bombing was not possible," US crews began highly inaccurate radar bombing. While the intention was to hit military targets, the effect was to haphazardly scatter bombs throughout urban areas. Such attacks were justified by arguing that the intent was still to hit the military target. ... By the end of the war, US aircraft had firebombed or dropped nuclear weapons on over 65 cities, killing 330,000 civilians in Japan alone. Reflecting on this devastation, General Curtis Lemay, Commander of Pacific Bomber Command during WWII said, "No matter how you slice it, you're going to kill an awful lot of civilians. Thousands and thousands. But, if you don't destroy the Japanese industry we're going to have to invade Japan. And how many Americans will be killed in an invasion of Japan? Five hundred thousand seems to be the lowest estimate. Some say a million."

A year and some back, I wrote an entry about civilian casualties (and an addendum) in which I noted that an awful lot of killing of civilians tends to happen in war. What I didn't realize (as explained in the dual-use targets article) is that it happened so much in WWII that the Geneva Conventions outlawed it. (Though, as the article explains, the Geneva Conventions are subject to all sorts of interpretation on this point.) Of course, that didn't stop it from happening Vietnam. Or, really, any other time:

[In the Gulf War,] Despite dropping 88,000 tons of bombs in the 43-day air campaign, only 3000 civilians died directly as a result of the attacks, the lowest number of deaths from a major bombing campaign in the history of warfare. ... As the commander of the operation, General Norman Schwarzkopf said, "We have been very, very careful in the direction of our attack to avoid damage of any kind to civilian installations. It's going to happen; it's absolutely going to happen; there's no question about it, but we're doing everything we can to avoid it."

I find the difference in standards interesting. In the Iraq war, American bombs killed "only" 3000 civilians. In the World Trade Center attack, 3000 civilians (most, but not all, Americans) lost their lives. One of these things is considered a superb achievement of minimizing damage; the other is considered the most reprehensible attack on America and Americans in the past sixty years.

Yes, I recognize that in one case, the civilian deaths were a side effect, while in the other case they were the goal. I still think the numbers are interesting.

I also recognize that the problem is a complex one. If you accept the necessity of bombing (I'm not sure I do, but for the sake of argument), then if you also require that no civilians are killed, it becomes trivial to defend military targets by keeping civilians on-site and publicizing the fact that they're there.

Still, I think it's interesting that the result of all of this is that military leaders can say, in effect, "I know that our actions are going to cause the deaths of thousands of people who are not part of the military structure, but it's necessary that we perform these actions anyway."

There's a lot of outrage when civilians are killed in combat these days; I suspect most people aren't aware of the history.

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