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What Online Resources does the Cost of the War in Iraq gadget uses to display the data?
U.S. taxpayer cost source:
http://nationalpriorities.org/
War Iraqi deaths:
http://nationalpriorities.org/
War American deaths:
http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/
Other links to websites where you can find information about the Iraq War American casualties and Iraq casualties and others related to the Bush Administration plan on Iraq and the War.
http://mediamatters.org/
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/
http://www.democracynow.org/
http://www.alternet.org/
http://www.counterpunch.org/
http://www.michaelmoore.com/
http://www.aljazeerah.info/
http://www.progressive.org/
http://www.fedstats.gov/
From the Wikipedia:
The Iraq War (March 20, 2003 to present), sometimes known as the Second Gulf War, is an ongoing war that began with the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The US-led coalition overthrew Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and occupied Iraq, causing ongoing asymmetric warfare with the Iraqi insurgency and the civil war between Sunni and Shia Iraqis. The causes and consequences of the war remain controversial.
Casualties
Coalition
The icasualties.org website reports the death toll since the invasion in March 2003 as being 3,075 American lives (as of January 27, 2007). There have been a further 253 deaths among the troops of other coalition nations: Australia 2. Bulgaria 13. Denmark 6. El Salvador 5. Estonia 2. Hungary 1. Italy 33. Kazakhstan 1. Latvia 3. Netherlands 2. Poland 18. Romania 2. Slovakia 4. Spain 11. Thailand 2. Ukraine 18. United Kingdom 130.
Iraqi
Estimates of Iraqi deaths are highly disputed. In December 2005 President Bush said there were 30,000 Iraqi dead as a guess. CNN wrote: "White House spokesman Scott McClellan later said Bush was basing his statement on media reports, 'not an official government estimate.' " [104] U.S. General Tommy Franks reportedly estimated soon after the invasion that there had been 30,000 Iraqi casualties as of April 9, 2003.[105] After that he made no estimate of death tolls in Iraq. In March 2002 in Afghanistan at a news conference at Bagram Air Base, General Tommy Franks had famously said, "we don't do body counts." [106] [107]
The United Nations reported that 34,452 violent civilian deaths occurred in 2006, based on data from morgues, hospitals, and municipal authorities across Iraq. [108] [109]
For 2006, a January 2, 2007 Associated Press article reports: "The tabulation by the Iraqi ministries of Health, Defence and Interior, showed that 14,298 civilians, 1,348 police and 627 soldiers had been killed in the violence that raged across the country last year. The Associated Press figure, gleaned from daily news reports from Baghdad, arrived at a total of 13,738 deaths." [110] The Australian reports in a January 2, 2007 article: "A figure of 3700 civilian deaths in October [2006], the latest tally given by the UN based on data from the Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue, was branded exaggerated by the Iraqi Government." [111] Iraqi government estimates include "people killed in bombings and shootings but not deaths classed as 'criminal'." Also, they "include no deaths among the many civilians wounded in attacks who may die later from wounds. Nor do they include many people kidnapped whose fate remains unknown." [111]
In comparison, the Iraq Body Count project states for the week ending Dec. 31, 2006 [112]: "It was a truly violent year, as around 24,000 civilians lost their lives in Iraq. This was a massive rise in violence: 14,000 had been killed in 2005, 10,500 in 2004 and just under 12,000 in 2003 (7,000 of them killed during the actual war, while only 5,000 killed during the ‘peace’ that followed in May 2003). In December 2006 alone around 2,800 civilians were reported killed. This week there were over 560 civilian deaths reported."
An independent method for estimating the number of Iraq dead is by using national surveys of mortality. A study in The Lancet estimates 654,965 Iraqi deaths (with a range of 392,979 to 942,636) from March 2003 to July 2006, using this methodology [19] [20]. That total number of deaths (civilian and non-civilian) includes all excess deaths due to increased lawlessness, degraded infrastructure, poor healthcare, etc, and includes civilians, military deaths and insurgent deaths. This result was disputed by Bush based both on the number of deaths and the methodology [113].
In December 2006, the report of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) found that the United States has filtered out reports of violence in order to disguise its policy failings in Iraq [114]. The ISG found that U.S. officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence on one day in July 2006, yet "a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light more than 1,100 acts of violence."
Iraqi Healthcare deterioration
A November 11, 2006 Los Angeles Times article reports:
The [Iraq] nation's health has deteriorated to a level not seen since the 1950s, said Joseph Chamie, former director of the U.N. Population Division and an Iraq specialist. "They were at the forefront", he said, referring to healthcare just before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. "Now they're looking more and more like a country in sub-Saharan Africa."
Iraqi Refugees
As of November 4, 2006, the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees estimated that 1.8 million Iraqis had been displaced to neighboring countries, and 1.6 million were displaced internally, with nearly 100,000 Iraqis fleeing to Syria and Jordan each month.
U.S. war costs
As of September 29, 2006, over $379 billion has been allocated by the U.S. Congress for the Iraq war. Over $360 billion has been spent as of January 22, 2007.
* FY2003 Supplemental: Operation Iraqi Freedom: Passed April 2003; Total $78.5 billion, $54.4 billion Iraq War
* FY2004 Supplemental: Iraq and Afghanistan Ongoing Operations/Reconstruction: Passed November 2003; Total $87.5 billion, $70.6 billion Iraq War
* FY2004 DoD Budget Amendment: $25 Emergency Reserve Fund (Iraq Freedom Fund): Passed July 2004, Total $25 billion, $21.5 billion(estimated) Iraq War
* FY2005 Emergency Supplemental: Operations in the War on Terror; Activities in Afghanistan; Tsunami Relief: Passed April 2005, Total $82 billion, $58 billion(estimated) Iraq War
* FY2006 Department of Defense appropriations: Total $50 billion, $40 billion(estimated) Iraq War.
* FY2006 Emergency Supplemental: Operations Global War on Terror; Activities in Iraq & Afghanistan: Passed February 2006, Total $72.4 billion, $60 billion(estimated) Iraq War
* FY2007 Department of Defense appropriations: Total $70 billion, $59.5 billion(estimated) Iraq War
The current rate of U.S. expenditure in Iraq is approximately $6.4 billion a month.
Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, has suggested the total costs of the Iraq War on the US economy will be $1 trillion in a conservative scenario and could top $2 trillion in a moderate one. The Congressional Research Service recently estimated weekly spending at almost $2 billion per week, and that total expenditures have now topped half a trillion dollars. Additionally, the extended combat and equipment loss have placed a severe financial strain on the U.S Army, causing the elimination of non-essential expenses such as travel and civilian hiring.
Calls for withdraw from Iraq
A growing number of citizens in coalition nations have urged their governments to withdraw from Iraq. Supporters of withdrawal argue that the Iraq war is unwinnable, has no purpose, has parallels with the Vietnam war, has a huge financial cost, as well as the loss of innocent human life, and will be ended by a withdrawal of troops. However, it is clear that Iraq and Vietnam are entirely different. The number of Americans killed during the Vietnam War was 58,207, while the number of Americans killed in Iraq is slightly over 3,000. Another consideration is the destabilization to the Middle East region that may occur as a consequence of the sudden departure of the United States military. Given the strained relations between the United States and Iraq's neighbor, Iran, and considering the powerful influence of Iran among Iraq's Shi'a Muslim community, some people fear that Iraq is going to convert into a fundamentalist-lead client state of Iran. The civil strife between the Sunni and Shi'a communities, as well as Kurdish hopes of establishing an independent state of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, could lead to a full-scale civil war. |
