The War Moratorium (Formerly Iraq Moratorium)

It was one of those, " what did he just say? ", kind of moments.

David Kilcullen, the former Australian Army officer and counterinsurgency consultant to those in the Pentagon who make war and specific war plans, was on the Colbert Report on June, 23rd, promoting his new book, " The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One". Kilcullen was very adroitly making his way through the comic jousting Colbert has become known for when he said that toward the end of 2006 somewhere between 3000 to 3,500 Iraqi civilians were being killed every week. He likened it to, and I quote, "a  9-11 every week, inflicted on people who had nothing to do with 9-11".

Really? 3000 to 3,500 Iraqi's being killed every week? Where does he get his information? Certainly not from the Department of Defense.

The March, 2009, quarterly report submitted to Congress by the DoD titled, "Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq" has a much different view of things. The report contains two graphs documenting monthly Iraqi Civilian and Ethno Sectarian deaths, respectively,  from January of 2006 through February of 2009. According to these graphs civilian deaths in Iraq in December of 2006 spiked at roughly 3,700, the highest monthly death toll on the graph. The graph of Ethno Sectarian deaths tops out in the same month; December, 2006, the period Kilcullen mentions, with 2,100.

Even allowing that the two graphs represent separate sets of numbers, the total deaths in December of 2006 reaches only 5,800. Kilcullens figures would suggest somewhere between 12,000 to 14,000 a month, a figure more than double, and heading toward triple, the official count in the DoD report.  It's worth noting that Iraq Body Count, the source most often cited in a great many discussions of Iraqi civilian deaths, lists July, 2006, as the highest monthly toll since the beginning of the war with 3,159 civilian deaths, a figure well below the total numbers of the DoD graphs for both July and December of 2006, and way, way below Kilcullens estimates.

Now I'm no mathematician, but something just doesn't add up here. Who are we, and Congress, to believe?

I'd put my money on Kilcullen.

During 2007 he served as Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to Multi-National Force-Iraq, a civilian position on the personal staff of General David Petraeus. By his own account Kilcullen was one of the people responsible for turning the concept of "the surge" into specific plans on the ground in Iraq. It's hard to imagine that a man with his access to exclusive inner circles within the US military would have inaccurate information on such a sensitive issue as the civilian death toll. It seems more likely that he would have access to information others wouldn't have, or if they did have it, would not want to report it accurately.

So where do we go from here?

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced last month that an independent inquiry into the Iraq war will finally get underway sometime this summer. Congress should authorize such an inquiry as well, and they should further make every effort to determine just how many Iraqi civilians have died violently since the war began. And I would argue that the first person who should be called to testify in front of any congressional hearing on the matter is David Kilcullen.

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Steve Carlson is a member of the national committee of the Iraq Moratorium (www.iraqmoratorium.com), and a member of the Continuations Body of the National Assembly to end the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations, (http://www.nationalassembly.org). He can be reached through his website at www.bottomrungproductions.com