Awful? Yes, awful. But how awful?
Sorry to get into bleak death accounting, but if the point is for the world to notice, context matters.
Yesterday, Vanda Felbab-Brown sent me a report just published by Brazil's Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA) showing that homicides in Brazil between 1996 and 2000 have been under-reported by about 18%. Instead of the roughly 700,000 homicides that we thought had taken place in the country over these fourteen years, Daniel Cerqueira's study suggests that the true number is in fact about 850,000.
So we are talking about 60,000 homicides per year, or 5,000 per month, year after year after year. Obviously, Brazil is larger than Iraq, six times larger. But 6 times 500 is still "only" 3,000. In other words, as bleeding goes, Iraq looks like a mild case. Oh, and by the way, 15 to 16,000 people are murdered every year in the US, or 1250 per month...
The study of civil wars in the last decade has been skewed by a systematic neglect of criminal violence. The division of labour between war and crime specialists and the media prominence of the first has led to a massive exaggeration of the scale and severity of war-related violence and to a corresponding neglect of the ravage caused by criminal violence.
The sad fact is that the average Iraqi is probably safer than the average Brazilian and also much safer than a poor black male in Cleveland or New Orleans. Time to get real folks.
