1.7 million = America's Body Count If We Were Iraq

Are you smarter than a fifth grader?

Let's do ratios: 151,000 is to 27,499,638 as "X" is to 303,211,807. Answer: 1,664,930. That means the 151,000 Iraqi people dead out of the population of Iraq (27 million) would be equal to 1.7 million Americans dead out the population of the U.S. (303 million). Yes the 1.7 is rounded up, as we learned to do in fifth grade, but that takes into account the fact that the 151,000 figure is low.

The World Health organization reports 151,000 Iraqis killed between March 2003 and June 2006 (Yes, folks, that's 2006. We haven't even counted the Iraqis killed in the past 18 months, some of the deadliest of the war). The WHO study found that somewhere between 104,000 and 223,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, so they split the difference, coming up with 151,000. The WHO report released January 10, 2008 found the number of civilian deaths to be much fewer that the 600,000 the Johns Hopkins team reported (October 2006 in the Lancet), but twice the number tallied by Iraqbodycount.org.

58,000 Americans lost their lives in Vietnam (and millions of Vietnamese died). 3,921 U.S. servicemen and women have died in Iraq. Too few of us feel the pain of their families. We know the impact 58,000 deaths over 10 years had on our country, and none of those effects were good. Imagine what Iraq is going through as, in three years, three times the number of U.S deaths in Vietnam afflicts their population that is not even 10% the size of the United States.

151,000 civilian deaths mean that a bit more than half of 1% of the population of Iraq died in a little over three years. Half of 1% of the USA is roughly 1.7 million Americans. There are only four cities in the USA with populations larger than 1.7 million (New York, LA, Chicago and Houston). Losing 1.7 million would be killing all of Philadelphia and some 250,000 more people. Or Dallas plus 500,000. Kill off all of Detroit and Indianapolis and you would still be 100,000 below 1.7 million. Manhattan and Newark would add up to a bit more than 1.7 million.

Florida's population is a little above 18 million. Killing every tenth person in the Sunshine State would be 100,000 above 1.7 million. Delaware and Wyoming together total only 1,387,594. Add half of Alaska's 683,478, and you have 1,729,333. The ratio of those dead in Iraq equals the entire populations of 2.5 states in the USA.

There are 17 million enrolled in U.S. colleges today. Killing one out of ten college students equals 1.7 million. 565,000 students from other countries enrolled in U.S. universities in 2005-2006. Multiply the number of foreign students enrolled by three (for the three years tallied in Iraq) you get 1,695,000, almost 1.7 million.

Let's put it in terms even Republicans can understand. Spending $1,000 dollars a day, it will take you 2.7 years to spend $1 million, 4.6 years to spend $1.7 million. Killing 1000 people a day, it would take 4.6 years to kill 1.7 million. It took a little more than three years for the equivalent number of civilians to die violently in Iraq.

A few years ago, the eighth graders at a middle school in Tennessee led the entire student body as the kids gathered six million paper clips. They wanted to give us a visual sense of how many were murdered in the Holocaust (shoah). Maybe some fifth grade will get together and string 1,700,000 paper clips together so we can see 1.7 million of something representing the civilians who have been killed in Iraq. Really cool would be the kids getting together 1,700,000 pennies and sending the money to kids in the war torn region of the Tigris and Euphrates, the cradle of civilization they read about in social studies.

We need to imagine what has gone on over there. It was done in our name, "We the People." Our government's illegal and immoral military actions have caused the deaths of the equivalent of 1,700,000 innocent men, women and children, if Iraq were the size of the USA. The Iraqis are people just like you and me. Even a fifth grader understands that. Even a fifth grader knows we must end this war.