BETH
OSBORNE DAPONTE is concerned that the White House has not told Americans
how it will avoid massive deaths to civilians in an invasion of Iraq.
Her concern should be alarming. Daponte was the woman who a decade
ago was nearly fired by the government for her estimates on the Iraqi
civilian death toll in the first Gulf War. ''Right now, it's just
like it was in 1991,'' Daponte said by telephone. ''People were sold
on the idea of clean war.''
Daponte
showed how dirty the first war really was. She was an analyst in
the Census Bureau's international division, whose normal job is to
estimate the populations of other nations. Up until then, the senior
President Bush, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, and the Pentagon refused
to make any public estimates of the Iraqi dead.
Daponte,
a Middle East analyst, was assigned to come up with an estimate.
She estimated that a total of 158,000 Iraqis were killed, with only
40,000 of them being soldiers in battle. The far greater death toll
came afterward; Daponte estimated that 70,000 Iraqis died through
easily preventable diseases that were suddenly made lingering and
lethal by the bombing by the United States and its allies of water
and power supplies, sewage systems, and roads.
Of
the estimated 158,000 deaths, Daponte concluded that nearly 40,000
of the victims were women and 32,000 were children.
After
the Associated Press ran the estimate in January 1992, Daponte was
told by the Census Bureau that she was going to be fired on the basis
of issuing ''false information,'' ''untrustworthiness,'' and ''unreliability.''
The
Census Bureau backed down after Daponte received swift and strong
support from civil libertarians and statisticians. A year later she
published an even more refined report with even more grotesque numbers.
In a study published in the quarterly publication of the Physicians
for Social Responsibility, Daponte estimated the final death toll
to be 205,500. The war itself resulted in 56,000 deaths to soldiers
and 3,500 to civilians. Another 35,000 people died in internal postwar
fighting. The biggest single number of deaths again was to civilians
after the destruction of the nation's infrastructure: 111,000.
In
Daponte's second analysis, the number of women who died from health
effects of the war went down, to 16,500, but the number of children
who died soared to 70,000. In addition, 8,500 senior citizens died.
If that number is anywhere close to true, that means that far more
Iraqi children died than Iraqi soldiers.
Daponte
now teaches population and policy at Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh. Her estimates tell a story of two wars. ''What I showed
was that it was true, we did minimize casualties from direct war
effects,'' she said. ''There were relatively few deaths from hitting
wrong targets. But what I also showed was the indirect casualties
could be much greater. It is no different than as when the infrastructure
of a city with the population of Washington or Boston is taken away
by an earthquake.''
Those
deaths occurred in what was a war meant only to force Iraq out of
Kuwait and back behind its own borders. The war that the junior President
Bush is threatening promises to strike deep into the heart of Iraq.
Any sane person would bet that the civilian casualties this time
will be much worse.
Because
of that prospect, Daponte thinks the White House owes the nation
projections of the damage to Iraq so Americans can make their own
calculations of whether we have done everything to avoid war. Projections
will be tough to come by: The White House has returned to Bush family
control, and Dick Cheney has moved up from secretary of defense to
vice president. Secrecy has already been established as a hallmark
of the Bush administration, and if the Census Bureau back then was
prepared to squash truth seekers like Daponte, one can assume that
the current corps of government demographers are already looking
over their shoulders.
''If
you are not having a discussion about civilian casualties, we are
probably not having a true discussion of whether this war is the
best thing we can do,'' Daponte said. ''If our goal is to eliminate
Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, I haven't seen any
detailed plans on how we do that without destroying the infrastructure
for the people of Iraq. . . . The idea of deaths in the drumbeat
toward war just isn't there. It isn't part of the discourse on either
side. It's as if the less that it is talked about, the assumption
is zero deaths.''
Daponte
said if Americans make the leap into war with that kind of calculation,
''that's the incorrect leap.'' When she says ''we need to be very
careful about not buying everything that the government is saying,''
she is her own best evidence. When she did her calculations a decade
ago, the government's response was to ''kill the messenger. They
wanted to keep that discussion off the table.''